Could you start by telling us about your background and the journey that led you to become the painter and academic you are today?

I have several previous careers – initially as an online content manager for an educational charity and then, more unconventionally, as the owner and director of a small eco-lodge in the Malawian rainforest, where I lived for five years with my husband. I always wanted to work with social and political issues, and I did that by working for charities and then running my own small development projects in Malawi. But I think I only ever found a really satisfying level of intellectual challenge when I went into academia. This allows me to research internal threats to liberal democracy, such as certain forms of populism and conspiracy theories, both of which can create problems that are exacerbated by digital media.

In the type of research that I do most, I try to understand the behaviour and communications of the people who threaten or undermine democracy, and so I spend a lot of time trying to get into their heads. Unfortunately, this is not always a very nice place to be. Some years ago, I returned to my long-standing life drawing practice as a way of dealing with it, and this practice gradually turned into portraiture. Painting these people has become a way of doing something about the potential threat they pose because it allows me to raise some of the issues that I believe we all need to be aware of, and to hopefully trigger discussion about them. Democracy is always a work in progress, and it will fall apart if we don’t continue to work on it. So paying attention to its threats and those who are trying to manipulate it becomes really important. Something as simple as talking about this is an incredibly powerful way of holding democracy to account and keeping it strong, so that’s what I try to encourage with my art.

In your art, you explore our democratic present and future and the role of truth within them. Could you articulate the trajectory that led to the integration of these specific concepts into your artistic practice? Furthermore, what visual and conceptual methodologies do you employ to investigate these themes?

I wrote my PhD on populist politics, and one of the things I found was that the populist wave of politics we’ve had in the last ten years has brought to the fore the sometimes problematic relationship between truth and politics. In particular, there was a moment in Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2015 when all the news media were so shocked at how much he was lying (the Washington Post had a count on its digital front page that reached something like 16,000 lies in the election campaign alone), especially because his lying was so blatant and unapologetic. But in interviews with his supporters, the consistent message was always that people had decided to vote for him because he was the only politician who told the truth. There was a sense that he was embodying a different kind of truth, an authenticity that has gone missing from our democratic politics as it has increasingly become so professionalised in its relationship to the media: prepared soundbites rather than conviction are what we hear most of the time from politicians.

But of course, this authenticity is itself a performance and so I find the idea of performing different kinds of truth – in a theatrical sense, as if politicians are actors on a stage addressing us as their audience – really interesting and a key concern in what is happening to democracy at the moment. In my portraiture, I have tried to engage with this performance, the ways in which polarising political leaders present themselves to the world. I want to raise questions about the act of masking that is taking place, even in cases where that masking supposedly involves the presentation of the true, authentic self. I’m trying to get at this in various different ways – sometimes by using impasto as a thick layer of paint or wax that resembles a mask, other times by imagining what leadership might look like if the performance were different.

You describe the current moment as one where "the mask is coming off" in politics. How do your portraits capture these performances of masking and unmasking?

Until very recently, those who have sought to undermine or delegitimise democratic politics have still done so under the guise of democracy, through a kind of redefinition of democracy that somehow gripped people because it spoke to their grievances. Lately, this mask seems to be coming off. More blatant, authoritarian and polarising behaviour and communication are being enacted on the public stage, without any attempt to disguise it. I’m trying to capture this moment of political leaders leaning into the sinister ‘bad boy’ strongman image that has been gradually emerging. For instance, I’m currently working on a portrait of Trump based on his mug shot – which he proudly displays in the White House. I have also recently painted Steve Bannon, Trump’s former official advisor, who is still heavily involved in the MAGA movement. As someone working in the wings, he has less need for democratic masking and openly says he is out to wage war on liberals. In that portrait, I painted him emerging from the dark and brought out a possible underlying message of one of his speeches in a kind of collaged word play.

As both artist and academic, how does painting allow you to explore "emotions and felt forms of knowledge" that traditional research cannot address?

Painting is to me a very tactile and visceral practice, even if a lot of thinking has gone into a subject and my treatment of it. There is something that emerges through that embodied practice, something untangible, felt and experiential that I think you can only really generate and capture in art. That’s also why I don’t plan my paintings too minutely in advance, there is an element of letting them emerge on a more instinctive basis, sometimes with colour choices and textures changing as I go along, and the sense-making process evolves, or an aesthetic instinct guides them. I tried to lean into this process as much as I could, especially in my painting The Populist Within, because this work was so focused on experiencing what populism feels like. I went through a fairly elaborate – and perhaps rather weird! – process of trying to embody Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist party Reform UK. I chose a particularly iconic moment of him giving an emotive speech and then sought to mimic his pose and facial expression by really trying to feel the speech (and this was one I felt a strong distaste for personally, which made this an extremely uncomfortable experience). Then I based the painting on the resultant photographic self-portrait. This was rather a large painting – 100x200cm – and I painted entirely without the use of brushes or palette knives, using only my fingers to apply paint. This decision was an attempt to get as emotionally close to the painting as possible, to somehow transfer the feelings I had embodied in this process as directly to the canvas as I could.

Could you tell us about your recent piece, Primal Orban? What are the foundational inspirations for this portrait and the conceptual objectives it aims to communicate?

Primal is an attempt to capture the moment when the democratic mask begins to come off. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been writing the playbook for how populism can, in some cases, gradually transform into authoritarianism through his idea of “illiberal democracy” – in short, democracy without rights and individual liberty (which is rather a contradictory idea). He is actively engaging with other populist leaders around the world, and there seems to be a learning process going on among them, so he is someone we need to pay attention to. In the portrait, I applied very thick impasto-style oil paint as a means of engaging with his embodied presence in democracy’s evolution and with the gradual shedding of the mask, back to an almost primal quality that is also very present in the fleshy quality of his face and its contrast with quite a naked gaze. The painting process led me to query what lies underneath that fleshy surface.

How do you balance academic objectivity with the emotional intensity needed for political art?

I don’t pretend that my artistic work is objective, neither do I think it should be, or indeed that all research should be. The type of research that seeks to understand people’s meaning-making processes – how they make sense of the world and present that to others – can often benefit from leaning into the researcher’s subjectivity and using it as a tool to understand and explore. For instance, we need to mobilise empathy to appreciate why many people see their grievances reflected in populists’ communications, and we need to interpret and read between the lines to understand how those communications do rhetorical work to persuade. No two people will necessarily arrive at the exact same interpretation, but that does not invalidate the understanding that comes from it. Rather, we can use that understanding to develop theory that seeks to explain the patterns we observe. Art takes this process a step further by harbouring emotional intensity in the process of understanding. All of this work is an essential complement to objective forms of research that can then be used to test the theories and hypotheses we develop to see if they are representative. 

Currently, you are collaborating with multimedia artist Parham Ghalamdar on a series of art video essays. What can you tell us about this collaboration? How does this multimedia approach differ from your painting practice?

This work is a collaboration in which we intend to take current research to new and different audiences. Parham is really the expert in this form of art, which is entirely new to me. We collaborate on most aspects of the process, so I’m learning as we go along. For instance, we are working together on the script and format and discussing how to visualise each sequence, and Parham then does his technical and aesthetic wizardry. But I then find myself surprised at how much the sound and image juxtaposition can change the overall impression of the piece, and so it becomes a much more iterative process when these different forms interact, change each others’ meaning and call for revisions and rewriting. I’m also finding it interesting to use different media technologies, including AI, to interrogate the role that these same technologies play in threatening democracy. The threat to truth-telling by undemocratic political actors’ use of AI presents us with intriguing questions about the kind of truth that we are creating with the same technology.

Throughout your exhibition experience, how did audiences respond to politically charged artworks?

I’m not trying to persuade audiences of a particular position or looking for agreement. I’d much rather use my portraits to open up debate because I think a different kind of truth emerges from that. And that is generally what I have been met with from audiences – interest in the kinds of questions that the intersection of art and politics can bring, and a new level of engagement with these questions. Sometimes I have to hold myself back from ‘imposing’ my opinion in dialogue with audiences because that’s not the point, and that can, of course, be difficult when you’re discussing an emotionally charged painting of a subject that you feel very strongly about. But I think it’s important to leave the work open to everyone’s interpretation and to rather listen to what they take from it.

From your perspective, how do art and artistic creation serve as a bridge between global societal and political issues and the general public?

In politics, we’re usually presented with very firm positions on issues, and then with other positions that contradict them, often without much context beyond our preconceived ideas and opinions that can guide our understanding. That seems to increasingly lead to entrenchment of ideas by opposing camps, rather than interaction between them, genuine reflection and open-minded assessment of the given situation. To me, what art does so well is to lean in to ambiguities and to present multiple potential meanings. This is such a great way of raising questions, generating debate and inviting people to reflect. So, ultimately, I think political art can contribute to generating democratic discussion and counteracting polarisation.

Lastly, what message would you like to leave our readers?

Don’t be afraid to talk about politics.

Learn more about the artist here.

Cover image:

The Joker. Portrait of Nigel Farage, 2024, oil on canvas by Lone Nerup Sorensen.

All images courtesy of Lone Nerup Sorensen.