Meeting and merging: painting animal/human encounters with medicine

My work focuses on the expressive potential of medicinal remedies as a medium for painting. My exploration is concentrated on aspects of the human relationship to animals in captivity and stems from a relationship I had with a caged bear when I was living in Georgia, Eastern Europe in 2011. The story of my encounter with the bear is important in this respect and I begin my text with that narrative, written in the third person so that the story has a wider resonance. My time with the bear affected me profoundly and prompted me to think more deeply about human relationships with animals and how they are expressed in contemporary art