Fluctuation and Emergence.

So, For a long time now my work has been very  figurative and story-based. I was telling stories directly. Personal stories, rooted in my lived experience, memories and trauma. At the time it felt necessary, and it felt honest and in some ways it was really cathartic

But recently I began to look at my practice and I started to feel that the clarity of the narrative was also kinda limiting me. The story itself was doing way too much of the work and in some instances the image explained itself too quickly and personally I dont really like that aspect of the work.

So with this most recent set of paintings, and especially as you see here, I've decided to shift more towards abstraction, not necessarily to hide the story but in order to go a little deeper.

Now as some of you may know, my personal history includes experiences of abuse and addiction and there's nothing neat in that, and recalling those events don't comfortably fit inside clear images or resolved scenes and thats what abstraction allows me to do. to move away from illustration of the memory toward sensation.

Instead of the painting describing what happened, I’m working more with how it felt to live inside those experiences—think of things like , the pressure, fragmentation, endurance, and the process of holding things together. If you look closely In this painting, the form reads almost like a tower or a vertical accumulation of things. For me , it was very important that this structure wasnt stable or resolved.

So if you look here at the top of the painting is lighter, more volatile, and less certain. You can see that the Forms are more open, the edges are looser, and the drawing feels more restless.

Personally I feel This area carries a sense of emergence and fluctuation. It feels like something is trying to assemble itself without fully knowing what it’s becoming. (or who im becoming).

As you move down the painting, the forms become dense ,heavier.the bottom carries more weight and you can see all the marks compress.

The colour darkens slightly.This lower section feels more bodily, more grounded, and more burdened.

The instability comes from the relationship between these two zones. The lighter, more fragile top is resting on a heavier, strained base. It looks like it’s holding itself together, but only just. There’s a sense that I could, i mean the tower could tilt or collapse at any moment.

That imbalance is intentional. It reflects a lived experience of surviving by stacking things carefully—memory, identity, control—without ever fully trusting the foundation underneath.

The edges of the forms remain open because I don’t want them to settle into fixed shapes.

They’re allowed to dissolve back into the ground.

That openness keeps the work from becoming symbolic or illustrative.

It stays experiential.

The grey field is not a background.

It’s an active space. It behaves like memory does—present, resistant, and never neutral.

The forms push against it, and it pushes back.

Drawing is central to the work because it carries time.

Lines appear, get buried, re-emerge, and sometimes contradict what’s underneath them.

That’s intentional. I want the viewer to feel that the painting remembers its own making.

Colour is used sparingly and under pressure.

The yellows, rusts, and reds appear where forms compress or strain.

They’re not decorative.They function more like bruising or heat—evidence of impact rather than harmony.