I spent years disappearing — into silence, suppression, conformity. I learned to be what was acceptable. To take up less space. To keep the volume down.

Art was always there. I trained across many disciplines, including architecture, art history, visual communication, drawing, and painting. I’ve worked representationally. I’ve worked in the dark. I choose abstraction now because nothing else holds what I want to say.

I came to it the long way round, through years of looking away from my desire to paint, not trusting myself, and unlearning every rule about what I thought I had to prove as an artist. That big spaces of colour were enough. That emotion belonged on the canvas. That loud, expressive, uncontainable work wasn’t a failure of skill - it was the point.

When I finally stopped waiting for permission, the colour came out fierce and full and unapologetic — everything I’d been told wasn’t acceptable. The paintings aren’t what happened to me. They’re what survived it.