“Fidelity and Eternal Life”
Oil paint and imitation gold leaf on wood in vintage gold frame, 50”x 26”. 2020.

In Fidelity and Eternal Life the artist depicts The Madonna and child, with saints Mary Magdalene and John The Baptist. The work playfully appropriates Christian iconography but recontextualizes it using that visual language and status as a tool to represent an alternative queer narrative and subject matter. The work’s humour and visual appeal make acceptable the serious critique of religions relationship with queerness. Inspired partly by the High Renaissance and its perfect balancing of contradictory – and hence seemingly mutually exclusive – artistic position. Real and ideal, secular and sacred, freedom and laws, line and colour are thereby reconciled in idealistic harmony. Fidelity and Eternal Life is a camp pastiche of Christian aesthetics interrupting tropes of portrait painting, blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of visual language.