I’ve long been drawn to the fragmented as a way of working — dividing an image into separate components, the way two stories, or two sides of one story, can combine into something more whole than either alone. Memory works the same way.
I remember realizing, as a child, that I couldn’t hold onto everything I experienced in full detail — that some memories blur with time, no matter how much I wanted to keep them exactly as they happened. It hit me first as a kind of sadness, thinking about happy moments that could never be recalled with total accuracy again. That feeling turned into an appreciation for the different ways people preserve memory. Being taken to museums as a child, something I resisted at the time, slowly became a real fascination — the idea that a work of art could be kept and still be appreciated long after the person who made it was gone.
In recent years, that fascination has picked up a second, more critical layer. Collective memory, especially in art history, has come under real scrutiny — whose version of events gets preserved, whose gets left out, and what we might be missing simply because we’ve inherited too narrow an angle on the story. That question sits alongside the earlier, more personal one, rather than replacing it.
Formally, this shows up in how I actually build a painting. I tend to divide a piece into components, sometimes distinct layers, and that division is often what tells me a painting is finished — my work sits somewhere between hard-edge and organic abstraction, between constructivism and symbolic abstraction, and fragmenting the composition is part of how I navigate between those poles.
I use fragments to hold different modes of expression within a single piece, and memory as a way of quietly injecting a thought or an experience into the work, rather than stating it outright. How this theme develops is still open — it may keep changing shape over time.
See artworks in following series: