Nobody warned us it would feel like this.

We adhered to the menu: Studied hard, climbed the ladder, said “yes, we can!” when we weren’t sure what we were saying yes to. 

We inherited a version of adulthood that had already begun to fail by the time we arrived: unaffordable, precarious, and quietly collapsing in ways that only later became impossible to ignore.

And then those merely whispered bequests: parents shaped by a repressed world, unable to fully translate themselves into ours; the instruction to be ourselves, handed down by people who haven’t been given that freedom themselves; the 3 a.m. arithmetic of making all the right choices and still finding they do not add up; the rituals we continue to perform long after their meaning has thinned out.

The crisis is not loud. 

It lives in the gap between appearing fine and bearing something heavy that does not yet have a name. 

That gap is where this work lives.

“Soft-Spoken Carnage” is about what we carry silently: the accumulated pressure of yet another generation taught to adapt, retrain more, smile a little, starve a little but ultimately endure. Not broken or defeated, just no longer willing to pretend to one’s self that there are eatables on the menu. 

I wanted to give form to that weight in this series of paintings that are, at first glance, academically precise but, beneath all that control, swarming with anxiety, normlessness, cynicism and the tension of personal alienation. They are visuals for that “performing okayness”, sometimes furious and sometimes comical, because, as D.H Lawrence once wrote: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically“