Entering the Garden: The Story Behind My Current Series
- Jul 22
- 2 min read
For as long as I can remember, I have been captivated by light . How it shapes what we see, and reveals what was hidden. Light has the ability to transform a landscape, influence memory, and bring clarity to places that once felt uncertain. This fascination has become the foundation of my work and the thread that continues to guide my paintings.
The Garden series began from a desire to explore the inner landscapes. The place within ourselves where growth, longing, struggle, and hope exist together. The garden became a symbolic space for the human experience: a place that is both beautiful and tangled, abundant and difficult, a sanctuary and a wilderness.
Within this landscape, figures move through dense environments carrying a light. This light is not something created by their surroundings, nor something dependent on their circumstances. It is something carried within them. A part of their identity and inheritance and soul. Through these figures, I explore questions of who we are, what shapes us, and how we continue to seek connection, purpose, and restoration.
As the series continues to develop, I've been exploring new forms within the garden. Outside of the studio, I began creating quilts, and the process opened a new way of understanding ideas that were already emerging within the paintings. The intentional gathering of individual pieces, the patience of shaping and joining fragments together, and the transformation of separate elements into a greater design reflected and deepened on the themes I was already exploring within the garden.
Quilt block patterns and structures have since emerged as another visual language within the series. I consider them symbols of care, memory, and intentional creation. Like a quilt carefully assembled from fragments of fabric, these forms reflect the idea that our lives are shaped by countless moments, relationships, and experiences. These layered forms resemble pieces gathered, shaped and placed with intention, reflecting the belief that our lives are not random fragments, but part of a greater design that we often can't see. Through this process, the surface of the work becomes a meditation on restoration, connection, and understanding of the the unseen hand that shapes us.
The garden is not a place of perfection. It is a place of becoming. It holds both beauty and brokenness, uncertainty and growth. Through these paintings, I explore the tension between what is visible and unseen, what is wounded and restored, and the light that continues to exist even in places that feel overgrown.
This series is an ongoing exploration of identity, connection, and the ways that we are formed. It is an invitation to enter the garden and to look closer. To consider the pieces that shape us, and to discover the light placed within us.
