In April 2024, I began developing a new body of work based on real human stories.

I was interested in what happens when someone else’s experience becomes the starting point for an artwork.

A life cannot be reduced to an image. Neither can love, loss, resilience or the decisions that change its direction.

So I did not want to illustrate these stories.

Instead, I began looking for another way to respond to them — through colour, movement, tension and the relationships between abstract forms.

This changed the way I approached painting.

The question was no longer simply what I wanted to express, but how much of another person’s experience could enter the work without being explained or represented literally.

Each painting began with a story.

But the finished work was never intended to tell that story back.

It became something else: a trace of the encounter between another person’s experience and my own response to it.

Looking back, this project marked an important shift in my practice.

I began to understand that abstraction could do more than express emotion.

It could hold the presence of a story without illustrating it.