I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of perception—not just what we see, but what we refuse to see. There’s a delicate, often painful dance between clarity and avoidance, between knowing something deeply in your bones and pretending it’s not there.
Maeterlinck’s The Blind was one of those books that stayed with me in ways I didn’t expect. The blind characters, lost in a forest, waiting for a guide who is already dead, are surrounded not only by literal darkness but by a haunting uncertainty. What struck me most was how much not seeing can reveal—about helplessness, yes, but also about denial, dependence, vulnerability. It made me think about all the subtle ways we choose blindness every day. Not just to protect ourselves, but because we’re not ready to hold the full weight of a truth.
That’s where my piece Blind comes from. It’s not just about physical blindness—it’s about the blind spots of the soul. About how awareness is distributed unevenly. About how we sometimes sense something is wrong, or tender, or raw, but we look away from our own intuition, hoping it will quiet down.
In Blind, the central green, eye-like forms represent that perception—strange, alien, emotional. They aren’t there to see in a visual way, but to feel their way through confusion. The red and orange tendrils surrounding them are messy, almost chaotic, representing how the world tries to pull us outward—into relationships, into fears, into societal expectations—before we’ve made sense of what’s happening internally.
What I wanted to show is that perception doesn’t only happen in the eyes. Sometimes your body knows before your mind catches up. You feel it in your gut. In your breath. In the tension in your shoulders. In that moment you say “I’m fine” and something inside you screams back “no, you’re not.”
My other piece, Sensibility, continues this exploration of embodied perception. The flaming petals shaped like eyes are not just watching—they’re burning. They hold the emotional fire that comes from being deeply aware, from being a sensitive person in a cold or polished world. It’s not just about being fragile—it’s about carrying something alive inside when everything around you feels chromed over, untouchable, unfeeling.
And then there’s Mirage. A work about being overwhelmed by sight. The eyes are wide open—maybe too open—trying to take in everything at once. The floral shapes take over, almost like they’re trying to soothe the overload with something softer, wordless, intuitive.
These pieces, in different ways, ask: What happens when we try to see everything but forget to feel it? Or when we feel everything and wish we could close our eyes?
I think sometimes we need to be honest about our chosen blindness. About the things we don’t want to face in ourselves or others. Not to judge it, but to gently name it. Because behind every refusal to see is often a part of us that still remembers, still aches, still hopes.
In contrast, embodied perception isn’t always neat or explainable. It’s murky, shifting, uncomfortable. But it’s real. It’s the body’s way of saying: “This matters, even if you can’t put it into words yet.”
For me, painting becomes a space to hold those contradictions. A space where I don’t have to choose between blindness and vision, emotion and analysis. I can let the strange organic shapes, the bright tendrils, the heavy chrome backgrounds all coexist. I can let confusion be beautiful. I can let discomfort be honest.
And maybe that’s what I’m really chasing—not clarity, but a kind of sensory truth. The kind you feel when you’re alone and your body remembers something before your thoughts do. The kind of truth that doesn’t shout, but hums quietly in the background of your life.
We don’t always need to look harder. Sometimes, we just need to listen to what the body has been trying to show us all along.
