To Our Glorious Future, 2021
‘To Our Glorious Future’ focuses on the Regency era and the birth of the British empire, a period of time that spawned a huge amount of self-congratulatory portraiture which now lines the walls of our museums and institutions. Britain is obsessed with its own history and how influential we used to be; we view our history with rose-tinted glasses, remembering our perceived victories whilst overlooking our various misdemeanors. Nationalism has been stoked recently by representing the past as something we should be moving back to, often painting a distorted picture of a greatness that never was. In my current work I take these confident Regency poses and subvert and disrupt them, taking a ‘strong and stable‘ part of my heritage and making it unsafe and tainted.