WOLFY SUNSET
Selected Projects
About
Welcome to Sunset Kingdom. A world of longing and a world of the heart. A landscape built of feelings transmuted into marks. Into its waves and skies I have poured my care and attention, my pain and longing. Here I have discovered pleasure and play, and found, time and time again, reasons to return to the ordinary world.
The journey towards Sunset Kingdom has been full of surprising encounters. The subject matter of the paintings reveals itself to me from the unknown. Strange forms and beings emerge, finding coherence through the hand that makes the brushstrokes, a recurring palette of colours and thick marks of delicious paint. Vivid colour counterbalances the bleak greyness of my inner world. Fluorescent pinks and reds break through softer passages of lilac, peach and yellow; turquoise and sea green gather around dark, solitary figures. The colour carries longing as well as pleasure—a reaching towards warmth, intensity and connection.
These paintings are attempts to crystallise a sense of wonder and awe. They are antidotes to bleakness: memories or relics of a journey, as well as dreams of a world beyond the fog. A world of vivid sunsets, magnificent creatures, strange, tender bodies and emotional landscapes. Waves thick as feathers; skies textured like the iridescent scales of a fish.
Moving between figuration and abstraction, the paintings bring together fragmented faces, imagined creatures and handwritten words. Recurring figures become archetypes within a personal mythology. The whale carries a gentle bigness, its life beneath the surface suggesting depths of feeling that remain largely unseen. Faces are exposed and unstable: eyes, mouths and tears become exaggerated marks, hovering between the comic and the sorrowful. These figures carry an element of self-portraiture, exploring the discomfort of being seen alongside the desire to be close to others.
Working in acrylic on canvas, I use brushstrokes to give these worlds movement and texture. Thick, curling strokes sit alongside thin washes and dry marks that catch the weave. Bands of colour stretch across the surface like changing light, interrupted by dark, wandering lines, splashes and ridges of paint. Figures and their surroundings share the same restless brushwork, allowing a face, a sea or a sky to become a place where feeling takes physical form.
I have long played with different ways of introducing people to the saga of this creative world. After all this time, perhaps the simplest way is to tell you a story.
Once upon a time, in a year called 2016, I found myself painting a sunset sky flanked by fjords. In the middle, a figure gazes into the distance from a mass protruding above the ocean. The figure was cut from a magazine: an explorer, perhaps, or someone from an advert. I can no longer quite remember.
Paintings carry conversations with them: scraps of language, a logic, a poetry. It takes time for a work to let go of the bits that don’t stick. Many things change. False titles fall away. This painting has always held onto three pieces of text: “The Discovery”, “The Call to Adventure”, and “Fishing for Minnows on the Back of a Whale”.
Standing on a whale, fishing for minnows is a Polynesian saying I had recently encountered whilst listening to Joseph Campbell’s conversation with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth. Campbell connects it to the “ground of being” - the deep source of existence is also the source of our own being, yet our attention stays turned outward toward little problems and pursuits. Missing the whales and the sunset, chasing god knows what little insignificant small things. Desperately seeking connection to life, while overlooking that we are already an expression of it.
Crossing the Threshold
After this first Sunset painting I began to make more pieces, many of them mixed media collages that felt like dreams or wishes from my insides. In hindsight it is clear that I was being called by my creativity to go exploring. And the works I was making seemed to be telling me where I needed next to go.
Mixed media, 2016 — details
Mixed media, 2016 — details
Transformation and the Unknown
In Iceland I became obsessed with the relationship between the ever changing weather and its influence on the landscape. I found myself often in a position of awe and equipped with nothing but my camera and my field note book I sought to not only document the world as it was unfolding around me, but also to play with reality.
Returning after Iceland I found myself returning time and time again to the same subject matter of the landscape. With devotion and obsession.
Expansion of the Field of Vision
It was amidst the isolation and restrictions of the pandemic lockdowns in 2020 that the impulses to create landscapes on a much bigger scale began to hatch.
I had never let myself take up so much space with my paintings and yet, because of my background as a theatre director, working with large scale pictures felt quite natural to me. And yet, like most people, my urge to expand was practically limited by the physical confines of my room. I commenced making a series of multi-panelled paintings that were made up of interconnected parts. They could open up and take up space, and then be put away in a space much smaller than their scope.
The increase in scale allowed me to make bigger gestures with the brush, and the marks, thus creating more movement. In contrast to the captivity of my physical body, these paintings served as a vehicle into expansiveness. The jubilance of making them is evident in the works themselves, which are bursting with energy and depict an ecstatic, blazing world.
The most ambitious and detailed of these multipanelled works is a painting, which stands as tall and wide as I am tall (6 feet), and has sometimes resisted a title, but seems to accept being called “Family Portrait”, as long as its made clear that this family being depicted has little todo with other people and is much more about the family of creatures and characters inside an individual.
There’s a central figure who has this green eye hanging in the frame around their heart area. They seem to be holding the little wolf cub like creature on the left panel in a gesture of care.
The wolf cub has fangs that could be mistaken for being quite scary but something about them seems also to be harmless. The wolf cub seems to only have one eye.
There is another figure on the right who also only has one eye (the one which the wolf cub doesn’t have). This figure has a pair of huge gold horns and seems to be in possession of some kind of ancient or knowing power.
Family Portrait — Panel 7 (2020) · Acrylic on canvas · 61 × 61 cm
Marks of Feeling
Psychological analysis of the figurative iconography of these pieces aside, the expansion of the painting practice into a bigger scale was always about finding more space for more brushstrokes. The size of these works allowed for a lot more detail in the texture and choreography of mark making. It felt a bit like if a dancer had been let out of the small basement they had been practicing where they could barely turn around without knocking over an old sink or rusty deckchair - jumps out of the question, they would hit their head on the ceiling - and given the keys to a big dance studio where they could finally leap!
The Social: Present and Elsewhere, Together and Apart
I started to imagine this place called The Sunset Kingdom diner which is both a great place to have a cup of tea whilst watching the sun rise or fall. To take in the world in solitude without having to worry about what your face is doing.
Or where you might find yourself gathered with others for some kind of celebration. In the painting called The Social Gathering I once again find myself revealing myself to myself in my choice of subject matter and the thing I paint my attention upon.
The figures are either faceless or without a head. They seem to be connecting through physical touch but also there is something that positions the viewer/me as the painter outside the picture. There are a few disembodied hands which reveal an obsession in the question of touch and connection and what we are holding on to. One hand is holding a phone. Another seems to be rising out from under the table, as if to say, there is an underbelly to all of this. Bottom right is a small creature that is labelled as “Lamb of Dog”, and looks a bit like a sheep in wolf’s clothing, who seems to be launching into Macbeth’s soliloquy “Is this a dagger”, directed at the bread knife. On the surface of another phone, face up on the table, is written the text “the isolated conversation”.
The final painting in this selection is one from a collection of drawings and paintings of torsos that I started making in 2023. And is still ongoing.
Here I continued to work with some of the colours and imagery from my earlier works but was seeking a way to introduce more drawings into my paintings.
I am inspired here by the way that queer bodies seek to embrace the invitation to reclaim their bodies as sites for expression, treating it as a canvas and also material to be sculpted with.
Once Sunset Kingdom started to have people in it, it felt only natural that they would be walking works of art, wearing their experiences, their hearts and their dreams on their skin.
Installation view of the boxing gloves on their mirrored display plinth. © KunstHausWien, Foto: Iris Ranzinger
I Wish We Had More Time (2026) is an exhibition created by the Institute of Queer Ecology for the 2026 Klima Biennale Wien at KunstHausWien, Vienna and curated by Stephan Kuss and Veronika Hackl.
It brings together experiences of loss at three interconnected scales: relationships between species, within human communities, and between individuals.
Ecologically, the exhibition considers how climate disruption unsettles the timing through which lives depend on one another: flowering, pollination and other encounters fall out of sync. Within queer communities, it turns to the ruptures of the AIDS epidemic and the work of chosen families, oral histories and archives in sustaining connections across generations. At the intimate scale, it explores heartbreak, missed encounters, separation and the ache of what might have been.
Conceived as an evolving archive of queer loss, the exhibition invited artists to make immediate responses to a turbulent moment. Together, their contributions trace the relationships through which life is sustained—and what happens when those relationships are interrupted.
It brings together experiences of loss at three interconnected scales: relationships between species, within human communities, and between individuals.
Ecologically, the exhibition considers how climate disruption unsettles the timing through which lives depend on one another: flowering, pollination and other encounters fall out of sync. Within queer communities, it turns to the ruptures of the AIDS epidemic and the work of chosen families, oral histories and archives in sustaining connections across generations. At the intimate scale, it explores heartbreak, missed encounters, separation and the ache of what might have been.
Conceived as an evolving archive of queer loss, the exhibition invited artists to make immediate responses to a turbulent moment. Together, their contributions trace the relationships through which life is sustained—and what happens when those relationships are interrupted.
Freeze Response (2026) is a work in two parts: a moving-image performance on a frozen lake, and a sculpture made from the same children’s boxing gloves.
Part One
A boxer fights on a frozen lake. The gestures promise action, but the struggle leads nowhere. This futile encounter connects the paralysis of ecological crisis with the intimate experience of a relationship caught in deadlock. The past freezes the present. Faced with overwhelming challenge, a body, a heart or a society can become stuck: unable to respond, even as the need for action grows. The boxer’s repeated efforts embody that contradiction—constant movement within a state of freeze.
The moving-image work emerged through heartbreak and an inability to communicate: the heart freezing over, each attempt to reach another person repeating the impasse. These experiences mirror a collective difficulty in responding to ecological breakdown, where awareness and urgency can coexist with immobilisation. The frozen landscape becomes both the setting for this struggle and an image of its emotional condition.
A looped fragment of SOPHIE’s Is It Cold in the Water? accompanies the boxer on the ice, nestling them in a soundtrack of queer loss and what might have been.
Part One
A boxer fights on a frozen lake. The gestures promise action, but the struggle leads nowhere. This futile encounter connects the paralysis of ecological crisis with the intimate experience of a relationship caught in deadlock. The past freezes the present. Faced with overwhelming challenge, a body, a heart or a society can become stuck: unable to respond, even as the need for action grows. The boxer’s repeated efforts embody that contradiction—constant movement within a state of freeze.
The moving-image work emerged through heartbreak and an inability to communicate: the heart freezing over, each attempt to reach another person repeating the impasse. These experiences mirror a collective difficulty in responding to ecological breakdown, where awareness and urgency can coexist with immobilisation. The frozen landscape becomes both the setting for this struggle and an image of its emotional condition.
A looped fragment of SOPHIE’s Is It Cold in the Water? accompanies the boxer on the ice, nestling them in a soundtrack of queer loss and what might have been.
Part Two
Alongside the film, the same pair of children’s boxing gloves is transfigured into ornaments of spring. Roadkill turned opulent by the hands of care.
Found on a Berlin street and received by Sunset as a gift from the city, the gloves were transformed together with Cassidy Sundance. Given a chrome finish, they were encrusted with shattered windscreen fragments, broken glass, abandoned bits and pieces, oyster shells foraged from the river, and the first flowers of spring, then coated in epoxy and resin. Materials bearing the traces of damage and abandonment become a surface of colour, reflection and fragile beauty.
The gloves hold another possibility within the freeze: incubation. Their preserved flowers suggest that a period of apparent stillness may shelter something taking shape, even before growth becomes visible. Made through the experience of being stuck, they are a testament to the beauty that can emerge from it. The work holds the pain of paralysis alongside the possibility that the frozen heart might also be keeping something alive.
Together, the struggle on the ice and the ornamented gloves bring relational and ecological crisis into the same field of feeling, asking what might be held within the freeze—and what could grow from it.
Alongside the film, the same pair of children’s boxing gloves is transfigured into ornaments of spring. Roadkill turned opulent by the hands of care.
Found on a Berlin street and received by Sunset as a gift from the city, the gloves were transformed together with Cassidy Sundance. Given a chrome finish, they were encrusted with shattered windscreen fragments, broken glass, abandoned bits and pieces, oyster shells foraged from the river, and the first flowers of spring, then coated in epoxy and resin. Materials bearing the traces of damage and abandonment become a surface of colour, reflection and fragile beauty.
The gloves hold another possibility within the freeze: incubation. Their preserved flowers suggest that a period of apparent stillness may shelter something taking shape, even before growth becomes visible. Made through the experience of being stuck, they are a testament to the beauty that can emerge from it. The work holds the pain of paralysis alongside the possibility that the frozen heart might also be keeping something alive.
Together, the struggle on the ice and the ornamented gloves bring relational and ecological crisis into the same field of feeling, asking what might be held within the freeze—and what could grow from it.
These photographs gather encounters with the natural world: mountains half hidden by cloud, birds caught in flight, woodland, animal remains, and the changing surfaces of water.
Photography is a practice of attention—a way of slowing down, staying with something, and looking more deeply. The camera holds fleeting gestures and draws me into details I might otherwise pass by. Moments of stillness sit alongside sudden movement; sharp observation gives way to blur and abstraction.
Through sustained looking, one thing begins to become another. Waves become feathers, trees become faces, and the surface of water becomes a painting. A shift in light, focus or movement makes it possible to see something that the unaided eye couldn’t quite hold.
The collection grows out of becoming enchanted with detail: following a shape, a reflection or a rhythm until the familiar opens into something unexpected. And allowing for surprise.
Untitled
2025
2025
Untitled
2025
2025
Sometimes faces, bodies, creatures and places take shape. Other times, emotion and feeling come through in the marks. Familiar forms become tangled, stretched or rearranged, hovering between the comic and the unsettling.
These drawings are my creativity speaking back to me. Each is a surprise, a relic from an encounter with the unknown. Some become starting points for larger works; others remain as they are.
This ongoing collection brings together a changing selection from the practice, with new drawings added over time.
2026
2015
2023
2023
Groundwaters (2022) brought together intensely personal worlds with a shared resonance: creatures, shapes and stories emerging through ritual, absorption and the need to create. Drawing connections between contemporary artworks and objects of devotion, the exhibition moved through alchemy, memory and subterranean desire, seeking alternative narratives beyond established artistic conventions.
My contribution consisted of a pair of A2 line drawings from the series A Head is A House (2015), a 144-page artist’s book made with mixed media on paper (2020–2022), and the acrylic painting The Creation or Nothing (2018). Moving between individual drawings, the intimate sequence of a book and the painted canvas, these works give form to an unfolding personal mythology. They explore the relationship between inner worlds and inhabited spaces: the head as a house, the page as a place to gather visions, and painting as a space for imagining existence.
Curator Gabriel Zammit describes the works as “crafting a language that emerges from deep beneath the bedrock of everything which we can call ourselves.” Within this setting, my work became part of a conversation between distinct imaginative worlds—each rooted in individual experience, yet opening onto questions of who we are and who we might become.
My contribution consisted of a pair of A2 line drawings from the series A Head is A House (2015), a 144-page artist’s book made with mixed media on paper (2020–2022), and the acrylic painting The Creation or Nothing (2018). Moving between individual drawings, the intimate sequence of a book and the painted canvas, these works give form to an unfolding personal mythology. They explore the relationship between inner worlds and inhabited spaces: the head as a house, the page as a place to gather visions, and painting as a space for imagining existence.
Curator Gabriel Zammit describes the works as “crafting a language that emerges from deep beneath the bedrock of everything which we can call ourselves.” Within this setting, my work became part of a conversation between distinct imaginative worlds—each rooted in individual experience, yet opening onto questions of who we are and who we might become.
These performances move between deliberate invention and involuntary expression. A mask can conceal, but it can also give permission: to exaggerate, to play, to inhabit an unfamiliar version of oneself. Sunset becomes both subject and image-maker, exploring how identity is felt from within and constructed for the camera. The resulting figures hover between recognition and strangeness, intimacy and theatricality.
The footage becomes material to sculpt. Wolfy cuts, layers and recombines these recorded selves into choreographies of the face, where expressions overlap, interrupt and answer one another. Accumulating over time, the archive holds a shifting cast of selves, each brought into being through the act of performing and looking.
In 2019, we developed Endurance, for which I created the video. I subsequently directed and edited the music videos for Weather Balloon (2020), Strange (2020) and Here Comes the Rain Again (2021). We also created Movies, a film accompanying Mantawoman’s cover of the Weyes Blood song.
In 2023, I directed YANG QUEEN, Mantawoman’s show presented by Tangram at LSO St Luke’s, London, on 31 August and 1 September. Bringing together yangqin, original hypnopop songs, movement and video, the show explored identity and transformation. That year, I also worked as director and art director during Mantawoman’s Southbank Centre Studio Residency in the Purcell Room, developing the visual and theatrical dimensions of their live work.
Here painted canvas is draped over trees, falling into folds that suggest clothing on a body. Branches become shoulders; trunks become figures. The canvas dresses the tree, while the tree gives the painting a body.
Moving between painting, sculpture, photography and installation, the work explores how a surface becomes garment, and how a familiar landscape can take on a human presence.
Against a spare background, each shift in posture changes the encounter. A lifted chin exposes the throat, a turned shoulder partially conceals the face, and a direct gaze holds the viewer’s attention. The series moves between theatrical gesture and quiet intimacy.
Paint becomes a temporary second skin, transforming the figure while leaving expression visible through its layers. The photographs hold this tension between surface and presence, inviting us to look at the painted body and the person looking back.
With Patric Madden.
About
Through vivid colour, expressive gesture and a personal language of figures and creatures, Wolfy gives physical form to inner experience. Their work draws on queer, trans and neurodivergent perspectives, moving between tenderness, humour and unease to explore visibility, belonging and the desire for connection.
Their work has been presented at KunstHausWien, Valletta Contemporary, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, LSO St Luke’s, the Southbank Centre and in a damp woodland near you.
London | Berlin | Malta