Molly’s practice engages painting as a historically charged medium to explore symbols, memory, and the layered visual language of personal and cultural associations. Drawing on historical imagery, religious iconography, and everyday objects—often kitsch, discarded, or sentimental—she examines how meaning shifts across time and generations.
Her approach is rooted in collecting: fragments of text, found photographs, and objects whose significance has faded or changed. She uses these materials as a visual vocabulary to construct images that invite viewers to consider shifting cultural values, the residue of faith in secular contexts, and the uneasy relationship between intimacy and shame.
Molly’s work reflects a process of reframing and recombining familiar symbols to question their enduring power. She is interested in the way religious imagery persists in contemporary spaces despite secularization, and in the intersection of personal memory with broader social histories. Recently, she has explored themes of guilt, feminine experience, and the commodification of spiritual symbols, informed by her background in art history and her ongoing interest in visual culture.
She is influenced by the shifting aesthetic legacy of Catholicism in Quebec. Her practice combines a sensitivity to material with critical research on cultural memory, aiming to create works that remain open to interpretation while anchored in layered histories.

● Can you walk us through your typical process when starting a new painting?
– When I’m starting a new painting, it usually begins with research and collecting references. I read a lot for this
project—things like A Defence of Christian Kitsch, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, Caliban and the Witch, Everyday
Sacred: Religion in Contemporary Quebec, or even The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. I’m interested in how these
texts define the line between high and low culture. I also spend time looking at visual sources: Lucas Cranach the
Elder’s Lutheran etchings, but also eBay listings, flea markets, antique shops—anywhere these odd, charged
objects turn up. I’ll usually start with collaging and drawing, playing with how these images and ideas sit together.
Only after that do I move to paint.

● What is a specific symbol or motif that recurs in your work, and what does it mean to you?
– I come back to the apple a lot in my work. It’s a strong symbol—loaded with meaning across religion, folklore, and
pop culture. It shows up in stories that teach women to feel guilt for wanting, or for knowing too much. I also like
how cyclical it is. Apples ripen at the end of summer, into fall, when things start to cool down and reality sets in.
That moment—when sweetness shifts into something more grounded—feels connected to the themes I often paint
around intimacy, consequence, and vulnerability. There’s a quote I think about a lot: “seeds of darkness in a sweet
flesh.” That sums it up for me. The apple holds tension—between desire and punishment.

● Were there any critiques or turning points in your academic experience that were especially transformative?
– Yes—there’s one moment that really stands out. In one of my painting classes, a professor asked us to make a
piece in response to a poem. I loved the assignment, and it opened something up for me. After that, I started
writing my own poetry and eventually made a painting based on one of my own poems. During the critique, I
mentioned that it was based on something I’d written. The professor immediately asked me to read the poem
aloud. I said no—I didn’t want to. It felt too vulnerable, too exposed. But he just looked at me and said, “Well,
you’re showing us the painting. We already see the vulnerability. So just read it.” I didn’t really have a choice. I read
it, almost cried, and it was one of the first times I realized how much power there is in letting people in. My
classmates really responded to the work, and I did too. That moment shifted something for me. I learned that
vulnerability isn’t a weakness—it’s often the thing that connects people to what you’re doing.

● Can you describe your recent 3-D piece — what inspired it conceptually and why did you chose the vending machine as
its central form?
– It actually started as an idea for a painting of a vending machine. The 3-D element only really emerged after I
talked it through with Luisa and she proposed turning it into an actual object instead. That shift was important
because it made the piece more immersive and direct—it became a real site of transaction rather than just an
image of one. For me, the vending machine is the epitome of capitalist design: point of sale, impulse buying,
corporate branding, everything streamlined for consumption. That’s exactly why I think there’s this cultural
fascination with subverting it, like in Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City, where vending machines sell unexpected
items—it breaks that cold, standardised norm. In my piece, using the vending machine made sense for the themes
I’m exploring capitalism and Catholicism. It’s a perfect site for questioning what we’re buying
into—materially, spiritually, culturally—and what it means to package and sell those kinds of symbols.

● How do capitalism and Christianity intersect in this work?
– For me, this piece is really about looking at how religious imagery has been commercialised and repackaged—how
symbols that once carried spiritual weight get turned into cheap, mass-produced objects. I’ve spent a lot of time in
antique shops in Montreal, at Berlin flea markets, and even browsing eBay and Etsy, finding these absurd religious
items—plastic saints, glowing crosses, kitschy nativity sets. It’s such a stark contrast to the kind of solemn,
powerful imagery you see in churches or in art history classes—altarpieces, grand oil paintings, architecture meant
to awe you. I wanted to hold those two worlds up against each other: the sacred and the commodified. It’s about
questioning what happens to belief, ritual, and meaning when they get packaged for easy sale, and what that
says about both capitalism and the evolving role of religion in our culture.