Portfolio
“To paint during war is to choose a side — even silence becomes a statement.”
Art, Propaganda, and Resistance: Visual Culture During the Spanish Civil War
An extract from my final-year dissertation, examining how artists on both sides of the conflict mobilised image-making as a tool of political persuasion, and how some sought to resist that instrumentalisation altogether.
Dissertation Extract“Cubism did not shatter the world — it simply refused to pretend it was whole.”
Fragmentation and Form: The Politics of Cubist Space
An analysis of how Picasso and Braque's formal innovations were inseparable from broader crises of representation — and what it meant to abandon the single viewpoint at a moment of acute historical uncertainty.
Essay“The Surrealists did not escape reality. They went further into it than anyone dared.”
The Unconscious as Subject: Surrealism and the Interior World
Exploring the Surrealist project not as a flight from the real but as a radical interrogation of its foundations — and how automatic writing and dream imagery became instruments of critique rather than escapism.
Essay“The patron's hand is invisible in the painting — and everywhere in it.”
Power, Piety, and Patronage in the Italian Renaissance
Examining how the relationship between artist and patron shaped not only subject matter but compositional logic in fifteenth-century Florence, and what this reveals about the economics of devotion.
Essay“To classify is already to possess. The Enlightenment museum was an empire in miniature.”
The Ordering Gaze: Museums, Classification, and Enlightenment Power
A short critical essay on how Enlightenment epistemology shaped the architecture of the public museum — and whose world it was designed to display.
Short Essay“The canvas becomes a seismograph: registering tremors the eye alone cannot see.”
Painting Inner States: Expressionism and the Limits of the Visible
On the Expressionist attempt to render psychological experience in paint — and the tension between the desire for pure interiority and the inescapably material nature of the medium.
Essay