Sophia Wright sits down with Ethan Willoughby to discuss his creative practice that primarily encompasses two modalities: music and painting. As a DJ, Ethan aims to blend the mechanical and poetic into an operatic presence and embodied space; he extends this process of improvisation into his painting, which forms collections of gestures—burial scenes, crucifixions—in search of a non-space.

Ethan says, “It’s always tied to eliciting an innate instinctual response in the present moment. That song you just heard only existed then and there, like watching a bird dodge a falling branch […] I’m drawn to something that holds the weight of something mechanical or brutal even, but something still so sensitive and poetic as violin or piano.”