There are moments in an artist’s life when the most difficult question is not “What am I creating?” but “Why does it seem so difficult for others to see what I am trying to say?”
I have often felt misunderstood as an artist.
Looking at my body of work from the outside, it may appear fragmented: painting, printmaking, drawing, embroidery, fiber art, artists’ books, installation, botanical processes, recycled materials, animation. Different techniques, different materials, sometimes radically different visual languages.
And perhaps this is precisely where the misunderstanding begins.
In a culture that increasingly asks artists to define themselves through a recognizable style, a medium, or a single aesthetic vocabulary, versatility can easily be mistaken for inconsistency.
For a long time, I have wondered whether I should somehow make my work more uniform. Choose one language. One material. One recognizable visual identity.
But the more I look back at my artistic journey, the less fragmented it appears to me.
What changes is the form.
What remains is the question.
My work has always been concerned with transformation: the transformation of the body, of nature, of memory, of identity, of language and of matter itself. I am interested in the fragile threshold between the human and the natural world, between inner and outer landscapes, between what is visible and what is hidden.
Sometimes this research takes the form of a painting.
Sometimes it becomes a botanical print, an embroidered image, a textile sculpture, an artist’s book or an installation.
The material changes because the thought changes its skin.
A thread can become a line.
A line can become a drawing.
A drawing can become a body.
A body can become a landscape.
A landscape can become a memory.
A memory can become a book.
Perhaps this is why I have never been able to remain within a single medium.
I don’t experience these different practices as separate disciplines. I experience them as different ways of thinking.
The thread that connects everything
Looking backwards, I can see a thread running through works that, at first glance, seem distant from one another.
In Listen to Trees and Land(e)scapes, I explored our relationship with the living environment and the possibility of listening to landscapes.
In Nomadic Garden and The Leaf Project, nature became something that could be carried, transformed, remembered and reimagined.
In Changing Experiences, Experiencing Changes, transformation became both a personal and collective condition.
In The Lost Thread, thread became a metaphor for connection, memory and what can be lost or found.
In Herbarium, botanical images became traces of encounters with the natural world, preserved through textile, print and book.
My embroidered portraits explore identity through absence, repetition and the delicate accumulation of a line.
My fiber sculptures allow the flat image to escape into space and become something bodily, almost organic.
Even my exploration of writing systems and ancient alphabets in From the Body to the Word belongs to the same territory: the transformation of a sign, from image into language, from gesture into meaning.
When I place these works next to one another, I no longer see dispersion.
I see a constellation.
Perhaps I was looking for the wrong kind of coherence
I used to think coherence meant visual similarity.
The same colours.
The same materials.
The same recognizable forms.
But perhaps artistic coherence is something deeper.
It can exist beneath the surface.
It can be a recurring question rather than a recurring image.
A way of looking.
A particular sensitivity toward matter.
A fascination that refuses to disappear.
For me, coherence is not repetition.
It is continuity through transformation.
The fact that I move between painting, printmaking, textiles, embroidery, books and installation does not necessarily mean that I lack a language.
Perhaps my language is precisely the movement between languages.
Perhaps my medium is transformation itself.
The difficulty of being understood
There is still a vulnerable part of me that wishes to be immediately understood.
Every artist knows this feeling: you spend years developing a visual and conceptual world, and then someone encounters a single work and sees only its surface.
A textile becomes “craft.”
A colourful image becomes “decorative.”
A botanical work becomes simply “nature-inspired.”
A portrait becomes “figurative.”
A handmade object becomes “beautiful.”
And suddenly everything that exists underneath — the research, the memory, the philosophical questions, the relationship between body and nature, the labour, the material intelligence — seems to disappear.
This can be painful.
Especially when you know that there is much more there.
But perhaps being misunderstood is sometimes part of the condition of making work that refuses to fit comfortably into one category.
I am learning not to ask every viewer to understand everything.
Instead, I want to create enough openings for someone to enter.
A thread.
A leaf.
A body.
A word.
A landscape.
A memory.
A transformation.
From there, the viewer can begin to discover the connections for themselves.
From versatility to coherence
Today I am trying to look at my versatility differently.
Not as evidence that I have not yet found my direction.
But as evidence that I have followed my questions wherever they needed to lead me.
I have changed materials because different ideas demanded different bodies.
I have moved between disciplines because no single medium could contain everything I wanted to explore.
And perhaps this is the real continuity of my practice:
I do not repeat a form. I follow a question through different forms.
My work may change its skin many times.
But underneath, there is still the same living thread.
And perhaps that is what artistic coherence really is:
not becoming one thing,
but remaining true while continually becoming something else.
