Hide (Skin) | 2026-
Hide takes its title from the word for an animal skin: something at once protective, tactile and bodily, but also something removed from the body and transformed into an object.
The series begins with this idea of the skin as our most elemental boundary — the surface through which we touch the world and through which the world encounters us. Animal hides, fur, human skin and tactile fabrics appear alongside fragmented, totem-like figures whose bodies seem simultaneously contemporary and archaic.
The works are deliberately sensory. Fur, velvet, silk, simple objects and brushed fabric used as painting support invite an almost physical response before an intellectual one. I am interested in that brief moment before interpretation, when an image is encountered through sensation and instinct rather than language.
The intense colour running throughout the series removes these bodies and materials from the natural world. It turns familiar things — skin, fur, flesh, clothing — into something slightly unknown. The human figures acquire the stillness and monumentality of idols or ancestral forms.
Gradually, the idea of the hide shifts from the biological to the social. Humans no longer wear animal skins simply for protection; we construct other skins for ourselves. A tailored suit, a silk dress, a particular fabric or silhouette can become an outer layer through which we enter a role, communicate status, gender, power or belonging.
The series moves between these two meanings of skin: the skin we are born into and the skins we choose to wear. Between them lies something persistent and much older — the instinctive, animal part of ourselves that remains beneath the surfaces through which we present ourselves to the world.
Finally, there is a theme of transformation running through these series. They feel as though the categories are constantly mutating into one another: animal becomes human, skin becomes textile, textile becomes clothing, clothing becomes identity, and the human body becomes an object or totem again.
The suit is simply another hide.
