Original Painting: Search Party

My painting practice uses abstraction and mixed media to map the internal experience of trudging through contemporary anxiety. I'm interested in the physical gestures we use to navigate distress—both the self-destructive and the self-soothing—and how those movements can become their own language for expressing emotional states.

Search Party emerged from a deliberate practice of expressing frustration: ripping paper. These torn fragments became outlines for negative space, overlapping to conjure illuminated figures that contrast against a dauntingly dark background. The effect is a visual language for how we stumble through the dark in tough times, simultaneously existing as isolated individuals and part of a collective searching together. The piece holds both the violence of the gesture and the possibility of connection within chaos.