My entire contemporary practice has currently been about exploring the fluidity of identity. As an emerging artist, I examine the complexities of my personal narratives and relationships with identity which become multifaceted. “Puro, Chile, es tu cielo azulado” translates to “Pure, Chile, is your blue sky,” a project that explores the complexities of living between two cultures by this unstable process of translation. Being a painter, I explore this through an investigation of unfamiliar material to my practice. The materiality of weaving and soft sculpture emphasises this cultural imbalance, intertwining with each other just like the yarn at my fingertips. Weaving is an unstable process of making, which allows me to embody and endure this push and pull of translation between cultures. I also draw inspiration from my Chilean heritage, creating video performance works that showcase these traditional dances in a Western context. These dances are performed as an interruption of tradition, by incorporating “Australian-tradie” clothing and attaching my weaving to the costumes. By immersing my practice in unfamiliar mediums, I rediscover my personal unfamiliar unity I have with my culture. This reinforces the slipperiness of identity as a subject of contemporary conflict.

Come Where The Boys Are deals with a different aspect of identity. Through oil painting, I explore the eroticisation of the male nude in online pornographic scenes. I am interested in this relationship between homosexuality and anonymity, painting scenes that are ambiguous from a distance. I place my own body within the frame, half-clothed, to re-create the context of the viewer’s relationship with pornography within a space of isolation. The nakedness of my own body in contrast to the ambiguous fornicating bodies seen painted on the computer screen creates a queer narrative of ephemeral desire. The contrasting colours fleeting off the panel reinforce this relationship of erotic fantasy and forced distance by a screen, creating a bittersweet celebration of queer intimacy.