Legion Sow, 2025

According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus cast a host of demons from a possessed man into a herd of swine, which immediately rushed into the sea and drowned. Folklore has a way of refusing such endings. Along the coast of Nova Scotia, old fishermen have whispered of a monstrous pig glimpsed in the fog, its hide slick with seawater and its eyes burning with an unnatural light. Some claim it is one of those very swine, borne across oceans by dark currents and sustained by the legion that still dwells within it. Legion Sow imagines this impossible survivor, emerging from the Atlantic as though Scripture had drifted ashore and taken root in local memory.

The painting explores the strange territory where sacred narrative and regional folklore begin to overlap. The beast is both grotesque and strangely believable, standing on a familiar shoreline beneath the watch of a lonely lighthouse while fishing boats linger in the distance. Its heavy body is unmistakably porcine, yet its serpentine tail hints that something older and less earthly inhabits its flesh. Like many creatures in my work, the Legion Sow is less a monster than an embodiment of an enduring question: what becomes of the things we imagine evil has destroyed? Myth has a habit of answering that nothing truly disappears. It simply changes form, waiting in forgotten places until someone is willing to tell the story again.