Writing Around and Presenting Your Practice Statement

Artist Statement

I work with fragile and resilient materials, recycled newspapers, wood, debris, to explore what we carry, what we lose, and what remains. My works are built, scratched, broken, reassembled. They are not decorations, but emotional surfaces: holding tension between beauty and collapse.

I’m interested in what fades. I use colour not just for its appearance, but for its emotional weight - as a way to record something felt. My wall objects and abstract sculptures function like memories: imperfect, layered, sometimes soft, sometimes violent.

These pieces may look delicate, but they come from a place of urgency, marks are driven by instinct, a kind of emotional necessity. The textures often feel like skin, like wounds, like ecstasy.

My art doesn’t offer conclusions. It invites a pause, a gut reaction, a trace of recognition. In everything I make, I’m searching for something raw and human - something that speaks without needing to explain.

Over time, I realised that the Artist Statement changes every week. Because you understand some aspect of your work better, or the context changes, and you want to change the emphasis of the communication. The first text is general and I use it in my portfolio, and the text below I use for the colour fields for submitting to open calls.

Newspaper Fields

Sometimes I wonder if my work is taken less seriously because it’s beautiful, emotional, or subtle. There’s a quiet suspicion in the art world: if something is visually attractive, it can’t be critical. If it feels good, it must be shallow.

My series of colour fields is made from recycled newspapers, layered by hand and sprayed with acrylic paint. Underneath the surface is news, war, propaganda, politics. But it’s been visually erased, replaced by calm, clean colour. What remains is a tension between attraction and discomfort, visibility and absence, beauty and control.

This process began from a personal place. I experience synaesthesia, colour for me is emotional, bodily, and immediate. These fields are not abstractions; they are sensations. But over time, the series grew into something more critical. I began to see how beauty itself can be used, like in propaganda, not just to decorate, but to control. To calm, to flatter, to simplify. Soviet posters, for example, weren’t beautiful in a Monet way, but they were seductive. They gave emotional clarity: pride, strength, identity. That too is a kind of beauty.

In these works, colour becomes a mask. The surface is smooth, even pleasant, but that’s the point. That’s how propaganda works: it gives you something emotionally easy to digest. It tells you: here’s the truth, don’t question it. You’re safe here. You’re on the right side.

I use this seduction intentionally. These works invite the viewer in, only to ask: what has been covered? What have you stopped questioning because it felt good? What stories are flattened when the surface is too pleasing?

For me, art is not just about critique through theory. It’s about feeling. And I think emotion can be political. Softness can hold resistance. Care can be confrontational. I want to challenge the divide between intellect and emotion, between what’s seen as critical and what’s dismissed as decorative.

If a work is rejected just because it’s beautiful, or too feminine, or not ironic enough, what does that say about the limits of our institutions? Who decides what counts as serious art?

Maybe the rejection reveals the very thing I’m trying to show: that beauty can seduce, but also question; that comfort can be dangerous; and that what’s pleasant on the surface might be masking something much more urgent underneath.

One more Artist Statement I use a lot for open calls

“I work with materials that carry weight - wood, newspapers, debris - things that have a history, things that break. I scratch words into wood, carve them out like wounds, like messages that demand to be seen. The words are few, and they are not explanations, just directions- fragments of feeling, hints of a larger story. Milk. Honey. Patriot; God. Spirit. Daughter; Expensive. Rich. Drunk… They hit like a punch or dissolve like smoke.

I don’t want my work to just sit there, looking polished and resolved. I want it to press against the viewer, to shake them. My process is immediate, intuitive, driven by gut feeling - something raw and bodily. It’s about tension: between structure and collapse, between the personal and the collective, between permanence and the fleeting moment.

Newspapers dissolve, wood splinters, colours fade. Everything feels temporary, but that’s what makes it real.

 Like Dostoyevsky, I want to grab the soul, shake it, and give it back - changed.”

And this is what I will potentially use for the Vessels

These sculptures might look like vessels, but they don’t hold water. They hold something else, stories, tension, memory, maybe just the act of being.

Each piece is made from my newspaper colour fields, material that carries daily noise, politics, and forgotten moments. I layer it over a metal grid and pierce it with wooden sticks, often scraps from my studio or found building materials. It’s a mix of what’s thrown away and what still wants to speak.

The structure inside is solid, always made of wood. It doesn’t follow logic, but it holds. Sometimes it feels like a body, wounded, open, stitched together. These forms are self-portraits in a way: emotional, unstable, but trying to remain upright.

To me, they are about the feeling of being made for something, even if you’re not sure what. They’re about fragility and resilience at the same time.

I don’t try to make them perfect. I try to make them honest.