Over the past year, my work has turned toward the surface, the skin of painting itself. I’ve been searching for a rougher, more layered terrain, a surface that breathes, bruises, and remembers. Each mark carries the trace of touch, a conversation between matter and emotion, between what is seen and what is felt.

This search for an honest surface has led me to Pojagi, the ancient Korean art of joining fragments so that both sides reveal their wholeness. In my own practice, the seams do not hide; they rise and speak like proud scars. Each stitch becomes an act of care, a small repair that acknowledges rupture. In their imperfection, I find truth, a reminder that beauty often resides in what has been mended.

Like the textiles that inspire me, identity itself is a patchwork, made of inheritances, displacements, and the quiet work of becoming whole. My surfaces echo this human condition: we are all assemblages of memory and experience, stitched together by time and tenderness.

In these layered paintings, I search for something shared, a language of touch and texture that speaks to what it means to be made and remade, to live within our seams, and still reach toward wholeness.

While making this series, I was moving through the grief of losing my dad—a disorienting experience that felt like suddenly losing my footing. That sense of pain and trauma is embedded in the work. I have never used purple or lilac before, having actively avoided them for most of my life. Yet in a state of feeling bruised and exposed, these colours unexpectedly felt right.