I first felt the need to give form to what remains after an encounter when I realised that memory carries its own truth. For me, what stays is never the person themselves, but the emotional imprint they leave behind. My work became a way of giving shape to that absence, to the tension between what was felt and what was lost. Each portrait is less a depiction and more a residue of encounter.

I often begin with a memory, but by the time it reaches the canvas, the face has already eroded. The process mirrors the instability of recollection, building and breaking forms until they feel emotionally right. In works like this one, the fractured surfaces and harsh contrasts between red and black act as visual metaphors for memory’s violence, how it burns, scars, and transforms.

I care less about accuracy than emotional precision. Memory distorts, but that distortion reveals something essential. I let invention serve truth, if a fragment or colour better conveys the weight of a feeling, it becomes the truth of the work. What matters is the honesty of the sensation, not the fidelity of the image.

The digital and organic coexist in tension. I use digital tools to construct, but I allow decay and imperfection to disrupt them. Texture, erosion, and raw colour reintroduce humanity into the digital surface. The artificial becomes a vessel for emotion, the technology feels rather than replaces the human.

I’m drawn to the paradox of strength and fragility because it defines what it means to be alive. My figures often appear powerful, but their strength comes from endurance, not perfection. Beneath the post-human exterior is instinct, fear, and longing. The tension between control and collapse is where I find the most honesty.

Emotion comes through in the material itself, the rhythm of marks, the tension in a brush stroke, the way a surface strains. Pain distorts, joy lights up, silence opens space. I build textures and layers that feel alive, like digital flesh holding memory. Every mark is instinctive, a pulse translated into form, a way to make the invisible visible.

Time, for me, is layered rather than linear. The process of building, erasing, and reworking leaves traces of every stage visible, like a palimpsest of feeling. Each image feels caught between formation and decay, about to dissolve but still clinging to presence. I don’t freeze time, I let it haunt the image.

The work begins with personal experience, but it always expands outward. My memories become structures through which others can see themselves. The emotions are my own, but the language is shared, grief, longing, intimacy, distance. Each portrait becomes both a personal confession and a collective reflection.

I think artificial intelligence can store data, but not memory in the human sense, it can simulate emotion but not suffer it. Yet that gap fascinates me. My figures live in that in-between, digital beings carrying traces of pain they cannot fully understand. They become metaphors for us, full of information, yet haunted by what’s missing.

Remembering, for me, is an act of love, survival, and loss intertwined. It’s love because it keeps others alive within us, survival because it gives shape to what’s gone, and loss because it reminds us that everything we hold is already fading. Memory both preserves and erodes, it’s the wound and the way we heal it.