Pockets, conceal or reveal?
Pockets, do they conceal or reveal? Historically, they were among the few places where women could carry what mattered most: small, private, precious things kept close to the body. My own most treasured possessions are my adoptive mother’s diaries, written during the three years she and my father waited to be approved for adoption. She began writing before I arrived, when I was still imagined, and continued until I was three years old.
The paintings, monoprints, and etchings in this series hold those writings as an undercurrent. They explore identity, motherhood, and fertility through my lived experience of being adopted, shaped by my mother’s journals and my own experience of motherhood. These ideas are not illustrated but channelled through abstraction, layered, partial, and intimate.
Together, the works return to a recurring question: what does it mean to choose to be a mother? And what does it mean to choose otherwise?
Innermost
This series of paintings turns inward, responding to a shared sense of urgency, the feeling that time is accelerating, that we must choose more carefully how we live, how we act, and how we mark our presence on this planet in the face of climate uncertainty. With this shift, the brushstrokes grow lighter, the palette more porous, as if searching for air.
Beneath the surface is a restlessness I sense in younger generations, and among my own contemporaries, many of whom are questioning purpose and value. This desire for change, for a rethinking of what our society holds as important, moves through the work as energy rather than statement, embedded in gesture, colour, and rhythm.
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.
