The Cowboy and The Concubine

Made over the course of a year, The Cowboy and the Concubine is a richly layered monoprint constructed from sixteen individually printed panels—the largest format possible on the artist’s printing press. This constraint becomes part of the work’s physical rhythm and structure, reinforcing its sense of cinematic framing and episodic tension.

The image stages a charged domestic standoff between two figures in a Print Studio: a stylised cowboy, holding a bottle and dressed in an exaggerated Western outfit, and a defiant, scantily dressed woman in leopard-print shorts and a robe. Their exaggerated attire and frozen gestures create a theatrical tableau loaded with contradiction, power dynamics, and absurdity. The brickwork, pop-cultural references, and symbolic objects (including woodcut figures and tools) all contribute to a surreal domestic mythology—equal parts soap opera, spaghetti Western, and feminist satire.

Themes of gender, fantasy, and emotional conflict unfold in layers, both visually and conceptually. The work speaks to archetypes of masculinity and femininity, refracted through humour, desire, and estrangement. Made through a process of meticulous layering and hand-inking, this print exemplifies the artist’s use of labour-intensive monoprinting as a vehicle for storytelling, emotional processing, and playful critique.