I’ve always been a tactile visual artist. I love the surface, the feel of paint and brush, the physical act of making. Working with AI as a tool has its own interest, but I still find myself craving the physical. That’s what led me to create the Welcome, Stranger! collection.
Conceptually, I liked the idea of historical photographs capturing greetings between earthly figures and otherworldly creatures — meetings and handshakes that never happened, but nevertheless are fun to imagine. I generated a number of these "photographs" with AI, and they carried that strange, archival quality I was looking for.
But I wanted more visual interest and conceptual depth. I thought it would be interesting to combine those AI "photographs" with other forms of art making — paintings done with brush and paint, photographs taken with a camera. The final works are collages of different ways of creating: AI, paint, and lens, woven together.
The conceptual origin of Welcome, Stranger — travelers from elsewhere arriving to meet new worlds — pairs naturally with a collage approach. Each image is itself a kind of meeting: between technologies, between methods, between times.
The Welcome, Stranger! collection is both playful and reflective — a set of strange encounters imagined, and a process that brought different tools into conversation.
