Snail (2025)

Snail is one of the most psychologically charged works in The Damnation Project. It depicts a woman fused with the grotesque shell of a snail, crawling across an ashen ground with streaks of black tears running down her face. Her hands grasp forward, not in escape, but in exhaustion—a motion both desperate and futile.

⤷ This piece explores themes of burden, regression, and self-containment. The shell becomes a metaphor for the weight of shame and memory, an external manifestation of something internalised too long. It drags behind her like accumulated sin, or the heaviness of survival itself. There’s a horror in her slowness: every inch of movement becomes a form of endurance.

Rendered in a palette of tarnished browns and bruised yellows, the painting carries the texture of decay—earthy, suffocating, and strangely intimate. The figure’s tear-streaked mask references both the commedia dell’arte and the image of a martyr, a woman doomed to carry her own undoing.

The title Snail is deceptively simple. It invokes patience, fragility, and repulsion all at once. In the world of Damnation, this hybrid creature is not just a monster—it’s a confession.