The combination of being somewhere new and having a deadline to create work was very energizing. Both cities affected my work in different ways and the paintings I made feel very connected to each city and time. The work I developed in Chongqing was very playful and loud, very much the result of exploring a new place, photographing everything around me and working with the images back to the studio. My time in Liverpool felt more reflective, stepping away from routine, processing things from my personal life and painting. It didn’t have what I call the ‘half-holiday’ feeling of working in a different country. Both cities have definitely influenced my practice, particularly by adding new elements to my work rather than changing my focus.

I hope it will, but due to quarantine it hasn’t felt that much like a social habitat. I only moved into my space here at the beginning of March so I’m yet to experience how the building normally runs.

I hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but yes. I want the end results to look like sampled images, whether they are or not. The process allows me to translate and mistranslate images into something that fits into one of the visual languages I use. It also allows me to filter out any images that may not really work within a painting for any reason. This way of working allows me to “pre-make” most of the potential elements of a painting, similarly to having a starting palette. Then, the painting process becomes more about collaging these elements together.

Definitely personal, but to different degrees. I don’t think my paintings are planned enough to be conceptual and I never start out with a message that I want the paintings to convey. My work explores different themes and there are ideas moving behind and within the imagery and painting process, but the most important thing for me is that a painting works. I see my paintings as more abstract than figurative; they have to function as images. I think of the connotations that the images within the painting represent more like poetry. There’s no story or narrative but these images connect the paintings to something definable in the outside world. I’ll often start with an idea of which images I want to combine in a painting but end up using different ones. People sometimes ask me if I made sketches for my paintings but if I did, I’m almost sure I’d never end up painting them. It’s the process, the phase of working things out that’s most interesting to me. A painting is finished when it looks finished, you can just kinda tell. Each element hangs properly, the movement is right.

There’s definitely an idea in European and American culture that the artificial, the colourful or camp (basically anything seen as feminine) isn’t serious or is ‘lesser’. David Batchelor looks at this connection in his book Chromophobia, and for me this draws a parallel with my own experience of moving through the world as a person who rejects a binary view of gender. I try to ignore traditional gender roles, subvert them maybe. It’s an odd combination of both being highly aware of visual gender queues, while also spending most of my social life around people that reject traditional ideas of gender and naturally this influences my work. I see my paintings as feminine but not traditionally so, they don’t demure or connect femininity with being female or a woman. It’s the unapologetic expression of non-traditional ideas of gender, the celebration of colour and lack of shame towards my own more feminine taste that I see as rebellious.

Most of my figures are sourced from photographs from my own life, it’s only recently that I started lifting figures from Old Master paintings. The paintings that you saw in my studio when you visited were mostly being used as studies. I’ll study the paintings, looking for different visual references I want to add to my own work. It’s more about learning or understanding the making of the image and recognizing the visual styles rather than reinterpretation. With the Baroque paintings I’ve been using to make this series, I’m looking at the application of chiaroscuro on a figure and how drapery was used to add splashes of colour, almost like abstract marks or shapes to guide the eye or create movement. I’ve also always loved Classical myths so wanted to take another look at depictions of those. Alongside looking at Old Master paintings, I’ve also been watching or rewatching Baroque influenced films like Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio and the 1951 The Tales of Hoffman.

Definitely, there’s less that has to be compromised on within painting as self-expression than in dressing or acting. I don’t paint negative things in my work really, at least I don’t see my paintings as about an “issue”. I like to make things without having to decide exactly what I’m looking at or with a conclusion I want the viewer to take away. The spaces and people that I draw from in my works are mostly those I’ve chosen and that reflects my own identity more than if I took the subject matter from somewhere outside of my own life. Of course, there are exceptions, like with the paintings I made during quarantine where the figures were taken from other paintings. But still, these are things I have chosen, which I’m interested in. There’s also a connection between the way I paint now and the way I put together a drag or clubbing lewk. I think that was an important point in my practice, to say I don’t have to decide what my work is about before I start creating. There are different things I want to explore, what’s important is that by the end I’ve made something that is visually captivating and interesting at the same time.

There was a lack of subject matter at first. Most of my ideas come from life and conversations with friends and other creatives so that lack of social events and sharing of ideas made me feel a little lost at first. I think this is also why I really turned to art history for a starting point, I started making art that reflected what I was looking at, watching and reading. I don’t know how new the subject matter was, there’s nothing from a new subject I only found due to lockdown but the decision to include elements lifted from another artwork is new. There was the realisation that if I wanted new figures in my paintings, I had to borrow them, as my life wasn’t generating images for me.

I made the conscious decision to include my identity in my practice in my last year of uni. And I think it’s important to declare that I’m queer and non-binary both for visibility and so that people know where I’m coming from when gender or sexuality appear as themes in my work. It gives greater context to my practice. The idea that my work makes steps to elevate our culture’s understanding of queerness I find problematic. It assumes that is made with a non-queer audience in mind, then we start to get involved with ideas of the straight gaze. This is properly something I need to think about more to be honest. I don’t want the paintings to allow the viewer to look down on a scene, so the raised figures and their directness help this. I include the people that I’m around in my work, and usually the way I represent them is influenced by the slight glamorisation that’s now the normal way of presenting oneself on social media and was also rife at the time of pre-modernist portraiture.

I think I’d like to include more detailed figurative elements as well as learn different techniques to be able to reference a greater number of painterly languages. But I don’t see the relationship between figure and ground changing much in my work, at least not at the moment, so I guess the paintings as whole pieces won’t become any more naturalistic or traditional. I’m hoping that returning to a classroom/studio environment will give me more time to experiment and hopefully, having a new group of artists around me will help to generate ideas that maybe wouldn’t have come to me if working alone. I feel that having left university three years ago, my practice has continued on the same thread. I’m not unhappy with how it is at the moment, but feel like playing with other possible paths will be beneficial and fun.

I’d like to. Last year I made a wallpaper design for an exhibition which got me thinking about experimenting with installations. The idea of people being able to move through a painting really interests me and there’s something about 2D theatre sets that I’d love to incorporate into a kind of extended painting / installation. I also have an interest in pattern design, I’d like to work more with wallpaper and maybe take this into fabric design. I’ve also been talking with a friend about collaborating on some super short video pieces but it has been put on hold.

I’m not sure at the moment, I was looking at residencies in Berlin and Lisbon and I’d really like to go back to China. I think any change of scene is going to change someone’s art practice, it allows you to notice things that seem new to you and release things that in comparison are odd about where you are used to living. The whole aesthetic of a different place throws up new combinations of images or colour palettes that you might not see in the spaces you normally inhabit.