For a long time, I thought rupture meant destruction. Like, if something broke open in your life, then that meant you had failed somehow. Or that your life had veered off course. Or that you were now broken. But over the past couple years, which were arguably some of the hardest years of my life, I've found that painting has become one of the only places where I could sit inside uncertainty, and texture, and layers of my pain, without needing everything to resolve perfectly.
That's why I am drawn to rocks, and geology, and strata, heat and pressure. Rocks are the OG storytellers. They carry evidence of movement. Compression. Collision. Transformation. Entire histories buried in layers. The more I paint the further I stray away from perfection. I'm creating honesty. I'm creating life in layers. Erosion. Texture. Evidence of movement.
I'm also drawn to symmetry, in things like labyrinths. We spend so much of our lives trying to create perfectly ordered worlds for ourselves. Perfect balance. Perfect homes. Perfect ID's. But the most beautiful things on earth were created through rupture. Canyons. Fault lines. Mountains. Metamorphic rock. Not because suffering is beautiful, or because devastation should be romanticised. But because transformation leaves texture behind and because we were not destroyed of broken. We were broke open. And from that opening, we can rise. This is the closest my art has ever felt to my actual voice. It's not polished, o0r resolved. But it is layered. Moving. Shifting. Becoming. Rising.