Feeela :: ARTIST STATEMENTThemes central to my work include identity, race, and sexuality; social identity, culture, and inter cultural processes and contaminations. Main subject of my art is the human figure, in particular feminine nudes set rigorously upside down. I turn the world upside down in order to change coordinates and create unusual points of view to slip things into normal and abnormal - shifting between toughness and delicateness, so that the brutal and the sensual are juxtaposed, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and alienation. I recently turned my attention to the idea of the body as an extended brain. Having lived in, and observed nature (trees in particular) for almost all my life, I developed a passion for anything is branched and ramified. Emotions and thoughts branch out from the body as if they were its inner extension and they turn visible, touchable, maybe vulnerable and therefore provoking. In the attempt to show how we would appear if our emotions and thought were visible. What is experienced as most important is seen as the biggest, irrespective of actual or factual size and by making some body elements so big, it increases the sense of abstraction concerning the picture frame. The majority of my works may be categorised as '[self] portraits', but they are not portraits in the traditional sense. Rather than representing an actual person, they represent an emotion or a state of mind which, by coming to light, changes, extends and disfigures the body which becomes itself witness of its culture.