My journey began with an attempt to depict the experience of not seeing, or seeing unclearly – a feeling I’m still exploring. For me, it’s an ambivalent sensation: both calming and exciting. I often compare it to pressing my face into a balloon as a child – dazzling and colourful, but also blurry and slightly suffocating.
Over time, I realised that this interest in unclear vision is really an attempt to understand my own limitations. Because visual language is where I feel most at home, any restriction of sight feels threatening. So what I paint is often this very limit – something difficult to face, but perhaps easier to accept once it’s understood.
In recent years, I’ve been drawn more and more to the pink, red, orange and purple colour spectrum. For me, these colours open up an inward-looking, almost subdermal, organic world.
Tendrils and gaps begin to appear – they can resemble creeping or submerged plants, but also veins, intestines, ligaments, or even an umbilical cord. These forms can feel both draining and protective at the same time. I see internal organs as symbols of sustaining, flowing and sensing life, much like plant tendrils in nature represent connection and growth.
A recurring element in this world is an eye-shaped opening or passage – perhaps a bodily orifice – through which you might glimpse, or even enter, a hidden place.
But this place always remains partially inaccessible, enclosed within a dazzling, colourful, blurry and slightly suffocating membrane.
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I’ve been working on a large piece lately, but I got to a point where I felt completely stuck. The painting just wasn’t coming together. I felt so frustrated and helpless that I snapped—I grabbed a scalpel, slashed the canvas to pieces, ripped it off the wall, and threw it in the corner. I’d never done anything like that before; my work means a lot to me. For days, I was actually mourning it. Every time I saw a photo of the ‘whole’ painting on my phone, I started crying.
Eventually, I decided I had to bring it back to life. I pieced it together, put it back on the wall, and started sewing the fragments with a needle and thread, following the lines of the tendrils in the composition. That’s how ‘Resewn Tendrils’ was born.
I’ve been obsessed with tendrils for a while now. They’ve crept into my work, and I’m trying to figure out why. They’re very dualistic: they represent both nourishment and depletion—giving and taking. To me, they can be anything from climbing plants to veins, intestines, or even an umbilical cord. It’s about the connection between our inner organs and the natural world—the way life flows and expands. An interesting thing happened with the slashed canvas: where I sewed it back together, these ‘bound gaps’ remained. A gap is a strange, transitional space; it’s a gateway to the unknown, something that’s both scary and inviting at the same time. Now, I’m actually experimenting with this process of ‘creation through destruction.’ I’ll paint something, knowing it will be painful to tear it apart. But this time, it’s a controlled destruction. I do it knowing that I can heal it and sew it back together, making it something even more exciting. It’s like the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where they fix broken pottery with gold. It’s about showing that our scars and flaws aren’t something to be ashamed of—they’re part of a unique, valuable story.
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