I paint the elemental interconnection between humanity and the stories we tell to make sense of what we live through. Long before we had answers, we had stories: a famine folded into the tale of two children who outwit a witch, a dark forest and wolves attacking livestock becoming a legend a village could carry from one generation to the next. Across cultures and centuries, stories have helped us navigate fear, loss, beauty and transformation. This dialogue between lived experience and storytelling, both timeless and ever-evolving, lies at the heart of my work.

Place is my collaborator. I am drawn to landscapes touched by legend and rooted in memory : places I have walked myself, others encountered through research, and some that exist only within the pages of a book. What draws me is less the landscape itself than the human impulse to transform places into narratives, and the questions those stories continue to ask long after their origins have faded.

Ink keeps a will of its own. It can be guided, coaxed, met halfway, and I have learned to let it lead. Pastel, in turn, answers entirely to the hand. Between the two lies my true subject: the trust and surrender it takes for a story to find its form.

Coloured inks fuse on archival paper to hold the instant an inner landscape begins to emerge, their fluidity echoing the flow of water and the spreading of roots. Soft pastel grounds that movement, its texture carrying the density of soil, bark and stone. Together, they capture the fragile moment when intuition becomes image.

I find myself in the lineage of Joan Mitchell and Georges Mathieu, who allowed paint to move ahead of thought. I feel the same pull toward Fabienne Verdier's souffle, that breath of energy carried through colour. Further ahead lies Julie Mehretu, whose layered maps and gestural structures demonstrate that a narrative can inhabit rhythm, movement and marks as profoundly as words. It is toward this horizon that I continue to paint, layering ink and pastel until instinct and intellect become inseparable.