Out of Place
Out of Place is about being somewhere that looks normal from the outside while everything inside you knows you don’t belong there. The animals in these paintings are frozen inside that tension — with no next scene to resolve it.
If someone looks at one of these paintings and thinks, ‘That’s what it feels like,’ then the work has done something important.
About this collection
Out of Place began with a feeling I knew long before I had a name for it: being somewhere that looks normal from the outside while everything inside you knows you don’t belong there.
A job. A room. A relationship. A version of your life.
It can be uncomfortable, isolating, stressful and relentless — like forcing a puzzle piece into an opening it was never made to fit.
The animals in these paintings are frozen inside that tension. An elephant in an alley. A giraffe in the Arctic. A polar bear in the desert.
Unlike a movie or a story, the image never moves forward. There is no resolution waiting in the next scene. They remain there, and your mind has to decide what happens next.
Are they going to be okay? How long can they survive there? What would it feel like to live every day in an environment fundamentally wrong for what you are?
For me, that connects deeply to ADHD and years of trying to function in places that didn’t fit the way my mind works.
But I don’t think that feeling belongs only to ADHD.
Most people know some version of being somewhere they desperately wanted to fit — and knowing they didn’t.
If someone looks at one of these paintings and thinks, ‘That’s what it feels like,’ then the work has done something important.