No one gets through the hard thing alone. Not really. You may do the internal work in private, in the quiet of your own reckoning, but the conditions that make that work possible, the witness, the permission, the recognition that you are not the only one, those are collective. Healing moves between people. It always has.
This painting came from that understanding.
Women Gather is the most energetically complex surface in the Emergence collection. Where other works in this series move toward lightness through open ground and quieter palettes, this one holds the full complexity of what gathering actually looks like: multiple presences, multiple registers, nothing smoothed over.
The warm blush and taupe ground opens the canvas broadly at the left, unhurried and soft. Into it the central elements arrive with real force. A cerulean blue field moves through the mid-centre, applied with loaded directional strokes. Burgundy marks press against it, dense and physically heavy. A fast vertical stroke of red descends from the upper right, the most urgent mark on the canvas. Yellow ochre moves in a broad deliberate gesture across the lower centre, warm and grounding against all that cool and dark. Pencil lines ghost through the surface throughout, thin and searching, the quietest layer in a painting that otherwise speaks at full volume.
The charcoal works on two registers simultaneously. Looping continuous lines move through the left and lower field, the same searching quality seen elsewhere in the Emergence collection. At the lower right a more deliberate architectural form is drawn, contained and structural, a different kind of mark made with a different quality of attention. Drawing and painting coexist on the same surface without either subordinating the other.
The painting's formal argument is about what happens when different presences occupy the same space without any of them erasing the others. Not harmony exactly. Something more honest than that.
From the Emergence collection, 2025.
Inspired by:
"No one is healed in isolation." — Bell Hooks
No one gets through the hard thing alone. Not really. You may do the internal work in private, in the quiet of your own reckoning, but the conditions that make that work possible, the witness, the permission, the recognition that you are not the only one, those are collective. Healing moves between people. It always has.
This painting came from that understanding.
Women Gather is the most energetically complex surface in the Emergence collection. Where other works in this series move toward lightness through open ground and quieter palettes, this one holds the full complexity of what gathering actually looks like: multiple presences, multiple registers, nothing smoothed over.
The warm blush and taupe ground opens the canvas broadly at the left, unhurried and soft. Into it the central elements arrive with real force. A cerulean blue field moves through the mid-centre, applied with loaded directional strokes. Burgundy marks press against it, dense and physically heavy. A fast vertical stroke of red descends from the upper right, the most urgent mark on the canvas. Yellow ochre moves in a broad deliberate gesture across the lower centre, warm and grounding against all that cool and dark. Pencil lines ghost through the surface throughout, thin and searching, the quietest layer in a painting that otherwise speaks at full volume.
The charcoal works on two registers simultaneously. Looping continuous lines move through the left and lower field, the same searching quality seen elsewhere in the Emergence collection. At the lower right a more deliberate architectural form is drawn, contained and structural, a different kind of mark made with a different quality of attention. Drawing and painting coexist on the same surface without either subordinating the other.
The painting's formal argument is about what happens when different presences occupy the same space without any of them erasing the others. Not harmony exactly. Something more honest than that.
From the Emergence collection, 2025.
Inspired by:
"No one is healed in isolation." — Bell Hooks
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