LOCALITIES/paintings
I paint closely cropped details of interior spaces which I see as metaphors for the human psyche. For me, the insides of our houses mirror the insides of our selves. My work is both deeply personal and universal. While my paintings draw from my own experiences, they also speak to a shared cultural consciousness. By isolating architectural details and removing them from their original context, these spaces become emotionally charged. I am interested in the way people often fixate on trivial details in psychologically heightened states when a single object or surface seems to carry the weight of an entire experience. My work is therefore concerned with both the banality of everyday spaces and the emotional intensity they carry.
The images I paint are fragments of transitory moments, gathered while passing through museums, hospitals, homes, and administrative buildings.These disparate spaces become metaphors for the fragmented nature of contemporary life. Like my photogrpahs, the tiles of my paintings are also fragments that I collect along the way. Snippets from online articles, social media posts, overheard conversations, and song lyrics are all jotted down and revisited at a later stage. In 1863, French art critic Charles Baudelaire described modernity as “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent,” arguing that these fleeting aspects of life should not be shunned, but used to “distil the eternal from the transitory.” My paintings occupy this space between fragmentation and wholeness, between what is fleeting and what endures.
The stairs, corners, arches, and windowsills I depict are liminal spaces - transitional zones that exist between inside and outside, here and there, one room and the next. While the concept of liminality has long influenced art and literature, it has recently re-emerged in contemporary internet culture as a collective fascination with environments that feel suspended in time. In my paintings, transitional architectural fragments become psychological spaces that evoke feelings of familiarity, alienation, and the tension of being caught between states of being.
Esk stared at the patchwork quilt under the old woman, because there were times when a little detail could expand and fill the whole world.
Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites
