“My practice interrogates the fluid thresholds between self and other, perception and reality, control and surrender. Rooted in drawing, painting, and collage, my work engages with the phenomenology of consciousness, investigating how we construct meaning through personal and collective experience. By layering form, material, and concept, I seek to collapse linear narratives—disassembling and reconfiguring notions of time, identity, and the body’s relationship to the metaphysical.

Recently, my work has shifted toward an exploration of vulnerability, intimacy, and transformation, engaging with questions of deservingness, reciprocity, and the limits of self-perception. Inspired by the raw sensuality of shunga and the fluidity of Hokusai’s Ehon Tsui no Hinagata, my compositions examine the interplay between exposure and transcendence. In these inquiries, I confront the illusion of control: the assumption that effort, revelation, or surrender must necessarily be met with recognition or reward. I investigate the tensions between expectation and presence, between the human desire for reciprocation and the unbounded nature of ecstatic experience.

Ecstasy—often framed as an external pursuit—becomes, in my work, a site of inquiry rather than attainment. What happens when the present moment becomes too overwhelming to sustain? When the body resists surrender, when the self demands validation? In questioning the structures that govern perception, I consider how assumptions of worth, deserving, and linear exchange shape our capacity to experience deep presence. Through this, I engage with the dissolution of binaries: control and chaos, giving and receiving, self and other.

This approach is not about provocation but about presence—about allowing what emerges to emerge, without the imposition of expectation. In relinquishing the demand for reciprocity, I position my work as a space of revelation rather than resolution, where surprise, accident, and ambiguity are as integral as intention. The act of making becomes an initiation—one that does not seek to conquer or conclude, but rather to expand.

In this surrender, I allow my work to move beyond the constraints of the known, embracing both darkness and illumination as equal participants in the process of becoming.”

-Komikka Patton