Painting, for me, is a physical record of what happens when body and psyche collide with something they can’t make sense of. In this series I set my personal archive of motherhood against footage of circus training and zoo enclosures. I am working through the trap that comes with paying for a miracle. An animal in a zoo buys its safety with its freedom; a child, in the act of becoming, ends up gripped by the same kind of control - language, norms, its own body.

The lion in the room is the constant threat you learn to live with: stop tending to the miracle, and a hostile world will chew it up. My paintings hold that exact point of contact between rescue and violence - the lion is the price the miracle inevitably costs. For now, it doesn’t bite. But it could eat you whole.