This painting employs its subject, the artist, as a metaphor for a broader political phenomenon - the widespread dysfunctionality of the left. I wouldn't bother to make such a painting about the right because I don't identify with it, but the left's tendency to eat itself is an endless source of frustration. I wanted to imagine what it might look like embodied. Like the left at present, this painting manifests a series of closed loops. Hands becoming heads becoming hands grasping at nothing; glimpses of a figure pouring a jug of water over herself as she spills her tea; a man whose ridiculously elongated and limp penis describes a sort of maze, a misplaced agency. Emojis designed to dismiss and ridicule, baby vampires in a nod to Mark Fisher. The harpy whispers an image of a doctor, seemingly baffled by his own diagnosis, which in turn obscures the face of the central figure. The winged figure perched on the shoulder of her other self takes its form from the image of the harpy, a mythic personification of stormwinds that has become a euphemism for a difficult woman. In Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy the harpies whisper in people's ears all their deepest insecurities and most shameful moments, but in the end turn out to be empathetic and good-natured.