Artist Statement
Gill from the Black Lagoon was the first. Before the Devil, before Dracula, before Frankie and Bridie. He arrived first — and in some ways, that tells you everything.
He's early to the party. He'll be the last one to leave. His hand is raised in greeting — webbed, fin-tipped, hand-cut from the wood into its own silhouette — and the smile is already forming. Wide. Warm. Slightly too wide.
WELL HELLO, LOVER BOY!
Except when he opens his mouth, what comes out isn't quite right. Something that makes the people around him find reasons to look elsewhere. To remember someone they needed to speak to. To quietly reposition themselves toward the exit.
Gill can't explain it. He's done nothing wrong.
Gill from the Black Lagoon is a portrait of the space between how someone sees themselves and how they are seen — and what happens when that gap becomes a wound, and the wound becomes a grievance, and the grievance begins, very slowly, to curdle. The interest was real once. The warmth was real. But the rejections accumulated and something that began as longing has been quietly transmuting into something else. Something that seethes. Something that has stopped asking what am I doing wrong and started asking what is wrong with them.
The question the work sits with — and refuses to answer — is whether people sensed the seed of what he was becoming, or whether their rejection planted it.
Every scale is a hand-applied Ben-Day dot — hundreds of them, graduating from bright lime to deep forest green across his body, with metallic foil running along the silhouette so the edges catch the light like something genuinely aquatic. The lettering is hand-painted in two weights — bold red and shifting gold-bronze metallic — the kind of typographic contrast that takes days to get right. The glitter catches differently depending on where you stand. That's not an accident.
He's beautiful, technically. He tried very hard.
WELL HELLO, LOVER BOY!
Mixed media on hand-cut shaped wood panel. Hand-painted acrylic, Ben-Day dot texture, metallic foil, glitter detailing, high-gloss archival varnish. Made in the UK by Stoofy. Signed, dated, Certificate of Authenticity included.
One of one. When it's gone, it's gone.
