My Artwork is sexual, macabre, emotionally fraught, and traumatic: citations of memory and instinct. Having experienced emotional, physical, and sexual
abuse, my work serves as a form of personal therapy. I explore desire, violence, and visibility through luminous, fragmented depictions of the body. Influenced early on by Carole Caroompas, Neal questions who has the authority to depict the body of a girl and how young women navigate being seen. Her reflective chrome motif turns the gaze back on the viewer, pointing to both vulnerability and defiance. Neal’s work emerges from the experiences of a generation shaped by the rise of MeToo and the rollback of bodily autonomy in the United States.

My painting begins with poetry. These written pieces act as the foundation for
collages made from found images, which I then reconstruct into paintings. This writing is a document of my own psychosexual fears and the confrontation of sex and violence. This method allows me to find a larger story, with my own personal accounts found in the deep recesses of layered
references, playing with the tension between chaos and control, personal and universal, playful
and disturbing.