Declaring Christmas to be Jesus’ birthday was one of the great joys of my childhood. I was praised for being factually correct (to the knowledge of our household), and I got to steal attention from the son of God’s 2005th birthday.

I love Christmas.

I love the ritual, the domesticity, the theatre. I think that Christmas is probably one of the gayest things in the world (it’s misconstrued but very well lit). Everything one does on Christmas day is a little bit special. All emotions are acutely felt. Everyone is tired and maybe a little bit drunk. 

This isn’t the Christmas of the Church and of spiritual connection with one’s creator, this is the Christmas of Makro catalogues and extended shopping hours. This is the day one looks forward to but dreads at the same time. This is the public holiday which gave to us Turducken.

These paintings come from the privilege of being pitied and invited to many Christmases with families which have become my own, but were not always my own at the time.  As with a particularly suspicious fruit cake, I have picked out and savoured my favourite ingredients: dressing up, precocious children, failed gastronomy and underlying tension. 

My work discusses how we create our nativity stories; the visual lexicon which we pose around the manger and how it is read (mother, child, gifts, the star). These pictures are emotional scrabble tiles, arranged and scored; used judiciously they create structure and meaning. 

In embracing the ‘store-boughtedness’ of the compositions I have made (note the use of artistic licence). I want to unpack how they are manufactured; to celebrate the means of production behind the wording of a Christmas card, the seating at lunch, the elan of a small child who gets to dress up as a minor biblical figure. I want to rearrange the innocuousness of a secular family Christmas into something both gross and beautiful.  

Find available works from this show here.