In her own words.

01Origin.

Ididn't grow up calling myself an artist. I grew up in a house where everything was slightly re-arranged — my mother changed the living room every season, and I'd come home from school to a different country. By the time I was twelve, I had a specific opinion about interior design and art.

I made an apprenticeship in creative marketing, which at the time felt like a compromise between the two things in my head — the commercial one and the one that made pictures. What I actually learned was that the two things aren't separate at all. A shop is a scene. A brand is a script. A product display is a short story you can walk through.

02The practice.

I work across four things that I refuse to rank. Oil painting, pencil studies, retail scenography, and physical installation. The hours aren't even. Some months I'm mostly on my laptop drawing booths in SketchUp; some weeks I'm on a ladder with a fabric swatch in my teeth; some nights I'm painting a blue face at eleven and wondering why it keeps coming back.

A painting taught me about a product display. A product display taught me how much a painting was trying to get away with. — Studio journal, March 2024

I think of the disciplines as a rotation. When the commercial work gets too tidy, the oil paintings pull me out of it. When the oil paintings get too hermetic, a client brief makes me clean the studio and write a plan. Both of them exist in the same pair of hands and get better from each other.

03Commercial work.

On the commercial side I've worked with furniture and homegoods brands — Möbel Kraft as the steadiest of them, plus Remember®, Actona Group, Maisons du Monde for specific concepts. I design showroom scenes, seasonal dressings, booth systems and single-product displays.

My rule, loosely, is one intrusive choice per scene. The pink lion on the living-room wall. The hot-pink arch behind a glass cabinet. A gnome hidden under a bell jar. A scene without one unreasonable object in it looks like a stock photo.

04Personal work.

The paintings and sketches are my longest-running habit. I started the sketchbook I still use in 2022. I paint almost exclusively in oil because the medium forgives me — it lets me keep working a face for weeks until the thing under the face shows up.

The recurring subject is a face that can't quite hold itself together. Cubist in the pencils, softer in the oils. I used to be embarrassed about painting the same thing over and over. I don't think I am anymore. I think the same thing, painted many times, is the point.

The piece I'm proudest of lives somewhere in the middle of everything. Berlin-Bronzen, a pop-up installation at the Humboldt Forum in 2022 — a cast bronze head placed inside a saturated-pink mousetrap. I developed it with a high-school art course as a response to the restitution conversation around the Benin Bronzes. It was the first time my commercial instincts (staging, colour-as-argument, a single unreasonable object) met my personal ones (a face that isn't whole, a material that remembers) in public.

05What's next.

More hybrid objects. Less single-channel work. I'd like to make a showroom that's also an installation and call it both things honestly. I'd like to paint a larger canvas. I'd like to learn to cast in bronze myself instead of commissioning it.

If any of that sounds like a conversation you'd want to have — write to the studio.