Beyond The Serpent Nebula

Beyond The Serpent Nebula is an ongoing project spanning from 2021 to 2025, encompassing the full range of mediums within my multidisciplinary practice: photography, painting, drawing, video, and audio/music production. At its core, the work is about growth and the attrition of coming of age, examined through shifting perspectives, mediums, and styles. Each piece serves as a waypoint in the process of self-discovery, capturing the tensions between uncertainty and transformation, fear and resilience. Through this body of work, I seek to map out the experience of personal evolution, offering glimpses into both the struggle and beauty of moving beyond internal limitations.

The Serpent Nebula represents the universe of my mind—a vast, internal expanse shaped by its limitations. To move beyond it is to transcend these constraints, stepping into a clearer, more balanced perception of reality, free from the distortions of anxiety, distraction, and depression.

The Pain Configuration, a series of paintings on canvas, maps the different perceptual ranges of this universe:

1. Telescopic – Works such as Pain Configuration: Abyss I, II & III exist at the farthest reaches, embodying a modern, abstract expressionism influenced by Rothko’s minimalism—akin to observing the Milky Way from a distance. Pain Configuration: Hellfire brings us closer, resembling a solar system, with raw, visceral expressionism inspired by Clifford Still and Pollock. At this stage, there is no defined form, only gesture and emotion—like a wailing electric guitar, fragmented thoughts, and blurred memories.

2. Planetary – In Pain Configuration: Fear of Falling, abstraction begins to yield to figuration and the manipulation of form. This transition continues in Pain Configuration: Sacrificial God/Study of a Bull 2, where recognizable imagery emerges within the chaos.

3. Human POV – The majority of my paintings exist within this range, where perception aligns with everyday human experience. Pain Configuration: Sacrificial God/Study of a Bull 2 further explores figuration, alongside works such as Shiver I-VI, which depict a world in flux—melting, pouring down, dissolving. Many of my photographs also operate at this level, capturing symbolic growth and the evolving "Growth State" of the self through a set of portraits that are as intimate as they are mysterious. This range invites viewers to empathize with the subject, engaging with the psychological and emotional landscapes I seek to convey.

The Nebula Snake

"The Nebula Snake" or "The Serpent, Nebula" manifests as an abstract visual form, evoking the imagery of parasitic worms and serpents in heat. It embodies a destructive, negative force—a physical manifestation of internal corruption. Through this motif, I seek to illustrate the intangible yet deeply real entity that represents my anxieties. The Nebula Snake serves as a totem, not only for the universe within my mind but for the collective weight of fear, inadequacy, and unrest that shapes my experience of the world.

This motif is fully explored in The Nebula Snake, a series of ink drawings and prints on paper. The works vary in scale and style, ranging from intricate A5 fine-liner drawings to larger A2 and A1 pieces that blur the line between painting and drawing. The Nebula Snake serves as a vehicle for examining my anxieties—particularly those surrounding intimacy and social interaction. In the more abstract compositions, it acts as a grounding force, anchoring each piece within the universe of my mind. Almost always evoking infestation or parasitism, the Nebula Snake becomes a persistent symbol of internal unrest.

At the heart of this project is an attempt to communicate elusive emotional states—an earnest effort to grasp and articulate what often slips beyond comprehension. This pursuit necessitates a level of intimacy, yet mystery remains inevitable, as many of these emotions evade me even as I strive to understand and translate them into art.

This tension between intimacy and mystery is particularly evident in my photographs, where techniques such as motion blur and double exposure create layered portraits that capture the painful yet beautiful process of growth through self-reflective eyes. Works like Physical I & II, Flight I-V, and Growth State I-IV explore this transformation by juxtaposing or merging human figures with insects—most notably the winged white ant (Southern African termite), a symbol I have chosen to represent hope, metamorphosis and the pursuit of purpose.