ANIMALS

Animals have always been a mirror for me. They exist without the weight of masks, without the endless calculations of how to be accepted, without the fractured negotiations that shape human identity. To watch an animal is to witness purity of being, instinct, presence, survival. There is no performance, no apology. They are unapologetically themselves in a way I strive to be and wish society could embrace.

There is a tenderness in animals that I return to often. The way a cat curls into sleep, the loyalty of a dog’s gaze, the quiet dignity of a cow at rest, these gestures reveal an emotional honesty humans rarely allow themselves. We bury our vulnerability under layers of defense, but animals live it openly. Their presence strips away my own defenses too, reminding me of how much of myself has been muted by expectation.

Yet animals are not just subjects for me; they are collaborators. When I place them into collages, when I juxtapose their forms with fractured human faces, I am asking what it means to be human at all. Are we truly separate? Or are we animals pretending to be something more, weighed down by our delusions of grandeur? In that tension, between human and nonhuman, instinct and performance, my images find their bite. The animals are not decoration, but provocations. They are reminders, challengers, companions. They are the voices of instinct cutting through the static of culture. And perhaps, in their presence, you might glimpse the part of yourself that has not yet been tamed.

This intimacy with animals, however, cannot be separated from the violence of the world we’ve built around them. In Future Wildlife Portraits(2008), I imagined what was already inevitable: that society itself behaves as an invasive species. We colonize without hesitation, invade without conscience, demand that everything conform or be destroyed. Territories shrink, habitats vanish, and entire species are erased, not by accident, but by our insistence on ownership, dominance, and control.

The series was not prophecy so much as confession. Even then, it was clear: no space will remain untouched or unaffected by human hands. And even if one day humans disappear, our presence, our greed, our residue, our artifacts, will haunt the world long after us. We are an animal that denies its animality, but in that denial we have become the most dangerous species of all.

To look at an animal is to see honesty, tenderness, instinct. To look at humanity is to see the opposite: performance, destruction, control. My work lives in the collision of those truths. Animals remind me of what is possible, of how to exist without shame, without masks. But they also remind me of what we’ve lost, what we’ve broken, and what we continue to endanger.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to them. Not as symbols of innocence, but as witnesses. Witnesses of our failures, our excesses, and our cruelty, but also witnesses of another way of being. One that is simpler, more direct, more honest. To see animals clearly is, in some small way, to see ourselves again.

Limited edition prints available upon request.