There is a particular kind of loneliness that does not announce itself. It does not arrive in empty rooms or in silence, but in the middle of warmth — inside a space you know, surrounded by objects that belong to you, under a light you grew up under. That is the loneliness I explore in this series.

I traveled to Rotterdam in 2024. A friend offered me a place on her boat and access to a studio in an abandoned office building, the kind of space that feels borrowed from the city rather than belonging to it. I started using oil paint for the first time. I had no training, no plan. What came out was blue. The first paintings were total immersion. Figure, room, window, wall , everything dissolved into the same register, as though solitude had become the weather inside the canvas. The woman was not lonely inside the blue. She was made of it.

Something has been shifting in the more recent work. Colour has been returning to the rooms while the figure remains blue. A purple wall, red cushions, a patterned rug, a crescent moon visible through an arch. A woman wrapped in cloth smoking a shisha, the objects of hospitality arranged around her, a teapot, but no one else there to receive the tea. These are spaces coded for gathering, and they are empty of everyone except her. She is slowly becoming the only cold thing in a warm room. I am still learning what that means.

i know the specific performance of warmth — the tea that is made, the door that is opened, the face that arranges itself before anyone enters. There is a self that exists in those gestures that is not false exactly, but is not the whole of the person either. It is the self that holds the room together. That makes sure no one can see when something is wrong. My figures live just underneath that self. They are caught in the private moment before the performance resumes.

This is not a story about a culture that fails its women. Every culture does that in its own way, and none of them has solved it. This is something more specific and about what it means to grow up held by a society that is genuinely yours, that you love and that loves you back, and to find that even inside that love there is a version of you that does not quite have a place to land. Not because the love is false. but because all societies ask their women to be legible in particular ways, and the self that cannot be made legible learns to be very nonchalant, my figures carry this nonchalance. The warmth is real. the particular density of being known by people who have known you your whole life. But this is not the same as freedom, and being known is not the same as being fully seen. You learn to carry two versions of yourself: the one that is legible to the world around you, that moves correctly, that does not ask too much or take up too much space, and the one that exists in the gaps that version leaves behind. That second self is not hidden exactly. It is just never quite invited in.

Oil on canvas