The Offspring I (2024)

The Offspring I (2024) examines the intersection of motherhood, monstrosity, and divine creation. The figure is both Madonna and creature, illuminated from within by a light that feels less like grace and more like infection.

⤷ The painting presents a woman in Baroque attire, her head tilted back in a pose of ecstasy or surrender. Her hands cradle a swollen abdomen that glows from within, its golden light webbed with black tendrils spreading outward across her gown and skin. What should be a symbol of life instead pulses with dread.

I wanted this piece to challenge how we visualise creation — particularly in relation to the female body. The work draws on religious iconography, positioning the woman as a holy vessel, yet the light she carries feels corrupted. It’s not divine illumination but a consuming force, something gestating that defies purity.

The tendrils that wind around her arms and shoulders are not simply grotesque embellishments; they represent the invasive expectations placed upon women to nurture, to produce, to sustain. She is simultaneously glorified and possessed. The painting exists in that space between worship and horror.

Within The Damnation Project, this work serves as the genesis of a cycle — the first stage of transformation before collapse. The glow in her abdomen recalls the mythic idea of the womb as both sanctuary and tomb, a place where something beautiful and terrible can coexist.

The soft chiaroscuro lighting and muted palette root the painting in a classical aesthetic, but its tension is unmistakably modern: the question of what it costs to create, to carry, to become.