After years of working in various media, I picked up the colored pencils I hadn’t touched since childhood, longing to recapture some of the enchantment I’d experienced when the world was bright and new. But I’d not expected to enter a place unseen and untrodden, where that magic would be waiting for me wide awake, whole and untouched.

It’s like that dream of discovering a secret room behind a door that somehow never caught your attention. From that room I draw, using a process of free association to explore this unchartered yet strangely familiar territory.

Applied in thick, dense layers that leave no strokes visible and turn the surface of my drawings into a velvet-like skin, colour becomes object – something to hold or desire, taste or smell. Pigments oscillate between 2D and 3D, weaving together the abstract and the figurative, to forge landscapes that open doors to the unknown spaces within us – the unexpected places, from the faintest corner of heaven to the darkest caverns of the soul.