Kate as Queen Nefertiti is a series of thirteen paintings that combine images of the artist’s wife Kate with the faces of Queen Nefertiti busts.
Influenced by the artist’s excursion to the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania as well as their recent marriage, the paintings depict Kate’s face overlayed onto Nefertiti’s, resulting in hybrids that resemble both subjects, though, neither entirely.
The busts are presented in various states of decay; some are chipped and fractured, their faces evidence of their approximately three thousand year history.
In all of the paintings Kate is depicted with a slight smile and the authoritative posture of Egyptian royalty.
The artist’s interest lies in the notions of ugliness and beauty, ancient and contemporary, life and death, strangeness and familiarity, digital and the handmade and the unexpected connections between distant works in the history of art, particularly in the inter-cultural obsession with sex and death.
