ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a British, Portuguese visual artist living and working in the UK. I graduated from London Southbank University with a first-class Honours Degree in Film, focusing my dissertation on "The External Representation of the Psyche in Visual Art”. I work to make the invisible qualities of the mind and soul visible through photographic self-portraits taken through an expressionist lens. My work deals with Mental health, the subconscious and multiplicity.
The limitations of the space around me inspired me to look inwards creating new worlds, through the mind’s eye, achieved predominantly through photo manipulation. In my later series’, I chose to focus on in-camera distortion using a long exposure, a technique I have been working with for 9 years. Inspired predominantly by painters such as Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon, I use my skin as the paint and my movement and emotions as the brush, giving faces to different energies and complex emotions. I enhance these images, brining out only that which is already there. For my installation work, I string together separate frames to produce a final multifaceted portrait of a subject in flux between emotional states.