My work lives where paint and code meet, and I build Womb Paintings through the logic of technological images. I model digital 3D interiors that behave like ultrasounds, digitized membranes that smooth the body flat. Ultrasound is not neutral footage. It is authored through angle, pressure, cropping, and interpretation, producing a “legible” body by deciding what counts as signal and what dissolves into noise. I borrow that clinical authority on purpose. My paintings adopt the hyperreal polish of anti-abortion and medical surveillance imaging, a visual language that manipulates feeling by presenting ideology as evidence rather than something to be read.
I am especially interested in how anti-abortion imagery relies on the power of the frame and the mechanics of manipulation. In Lennart Nilsson’s A Child Is Born, the fetus is often pictured as detached from the carrying body and suspended in a blank void where cords, context, and consent disappear. The images read as clinical truth, but they were also staged. Many were produced using embryos and fetuses from miscarriage and abortion, which allowed Nilsson to control lighting, backgrounds, and poses, even arranging gestures that suggest innocence or fetal personhood, such as placing a thumb into the fetus’s mouth.
I work with similar tools of constructed realism, building womb environments in 3D and directing lighting, camera position, and composition. But instead of posing a lonesome space traveller, I reframe the womb as the foreground. I populate these interiors with the fraught history of reproductive health: IUDs as characters, tampons as icons, Lysol as a lethal contraceptive, menstrual blood swelling into oceans, orgasm erupting like infrastructure. These renders become paintings where realism is both lure and critique. Up close, brushwork breaks the promise of neutrality. Unlike a digital image that appears instantly, painting requires time and touch. The canvas absorbs stains, revisions, and care, keeping the maker’s body present inside a visual language that often tries to erase it.
Womb World extends that argument into gameplay. I scan hand-made assets into a game engine and stage an immersive womb where the player reads as an ultrasound technician. Using a probe-like controller, the player scans the internal space while surrounded by enlarged sculptures of an IUD, tampon, and birth control pill packet.
The game turns looking into a physical act and exposes the mechanics behind technological certainty. Where the paintings perform the slick authority of ultrasound stills and propaganda imagery, the game refuses to keep that illusion intact. It shows the hand through oil pastel drag, brushstroke texture, clay fingerprints, and scanned imperfections. It also shows the system through seams, glitches, open bounds, and the hard edge where the pixelated world ends. Inside the game, an ultrasound portal reveals the paintings as “stills” from the world, and the player can print images that mimic clinical documentation. The work makes visible how easily “official” images can be authored, repeated, and mobilized to promote ideology and enforce control.
Games are another form of technological trickery. Hyperrealism, gameplay mechanics, and cinematic polish can create an illusion of reality while obscuring the ideology of the developer. Game systems often present a neutrality of choice, offering freedom, customization, and multiple paths as if all options are equally available. But that “choice” is authored through defaults, mechanics and constraints encoded by the developer. I make those limits legible. My game contains no enemies, wins, or waypoints, yet violence persists because it often arrives through systems that present themselves as neutral.
Through paint and play, I treat the frame as a political instrument. I use the authority of technological images to lure the viewer in, then expose how that authority is constructed through cropping context, erasing bodies, and naming the result “neutral.” Womb World makes the frame visible again as a seam, a boundary, a default, and a decision.
