What Held and What Calls is meant to unsettle. It collects every fear and presses its weight down into the board with every layered line mark, so I can rise from it lighter. Call it a somatic practice of an artistic kind.

I use crosshatching of multiple coloured pencils, intersecting them, creating the composition and the emotional charge. I work on hardwood panel, whose uneven grain and natural stains become part of the emotional surface, considered in the composition from the very first mark. The figure emerges from thousands of layered crosshatching marks, dissolving back into the wood rather than sitting upon it.

The cool past presses from the left, the weight of what held me, what kept my hands tight behind my back and invisible. The constraint is still present. But the face does not care. The face leans toward the warmth that calls from the right. The warmth of postponed dreams. The face exists between these two forces, thanks to my truthful eyes and my warm heart, looking up, wanting everything.

Follow the journey