It all began with a fear of death and the question of what lies beyond life. As an atheist, I struggled with the impossibility of knowing what happens after death and why life had been given to us in the first place. Since my teenage years, I have been unable to stop thinking about death. This preoccupation led me to philosophy, where I found a possible answer in Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of Eternal Recurrence.
After a long break spent preparing for and settling into life in Australia, I returned to art, turning to oil painting instead of sculpture, which I had studied at university. Oil painting was an ideal medium for someone who had not yet found a permanent home. It did not take long for me to become immersed in the process. Gradually, I realised that I had been searching for something enduring, something that might remain beyond the limits of an individual life.
Rather than focusing on death, I began to turn my attention towards life and the present moment. I discovered that ordinary scenes can hold extraordinary power. Sunsets, oceans, fields, flowers, homes and neighbourhood streets became sources of inspiration.
Memories are everywhere, embedded in the familiar things that surround us. Inspired in part by the Nabis, who brought artistic attention to everyday life, I began to recognise how ordinary scenes could evoke personal memories and associations. For me, a painting is not complete on the canvas alone. Its meaning continues to develop in the viewer’s mind through the experience of looking.
The memories evoked by these ambiguous images may belong to the past, yet they also help us recognise where we are and who we are in the present. Memory is not simply the recovery of a complete image. When we recall an event or a place, fragments emerge gradually, connecting with one another to form a scene. I imagine this process as similar to Christmas tree lights illuminating one by one in the darkness, each light revealing a fragment until a larger image begins to take shape.
In my oil prints series, individual coloured circles function like these points of light. As viewers step back from the work, the circles begin to connect optically, allowing a larger scene to emerge. Through this act of looking, viewers bring their own memories, experiences and associations to the image, completing it in their minds.
The work therefore exists not only as a physical object but also as an encounter between the image and the viewer. What becomes visible is shaped by the distance from which we look, the fragments we recognise and the memories we bring. In this way, an ordinary scene becomes more than a representation of a place: it becomes a space in which perception, memory and the present moment come together.