2026: Casper Kitson

This year I have been focusing on surrealism as a movement, it really inspires a lot of my work. I believe that as a person, I have always thought and felt very visually and find I am able to explain my emotions more easily through drawings and images rather than words. I feel like surrealism in painting is the perfect way to express that.

My portfolio as a whole is very inspired by past personal experiences and explores feelings like paranoia and shame through the lens of medical institutions and rot.

This painting specifically is about vulnerability!! Especially the forced or unwanted vulnerability that comes within the context of a medical environment…People fear vulnerability, like removing a plaster from a wound, it can easily invite infection/intrusion/judgement.

A couple years back, I needed to get surgery on my hip joint after an injury and had to wear an open-backed hospital gown, an experience I tried to represent in this painting. I tried to focus on the feeling of unwanted exposure (especially in a clinical setting) and the feelings that followed.

The inclusion of an animal-like 3rd eyelid in my painting is supposed to convey the degree of alienation in doctor-patient relationships, and how dehumanising forced vulnerability / removal of personal agency (like wearing a hospital gown) can really be.

This painting again conveys a feeling of being the subject of a school science project, rather than a human patient. The use of clamps rather than human hands in this piece separates the subject from its ‘examiner’ even further.

I am hoping to begin a Bachelor of Fine arts at Massey University in Wellington in 2027.