Keywords: Intimacy, emotional manipulation, personal anecdotes & nostalgia

Sis-plane, Oil on linnen canvas 200 x 140 cm (2021)

There are moments when I return to places from my past, and I no longer recognize them — yet, somehow, they still remember me. The air holds the echoes of laughter, fear, and confusion that once shaped who I am. These places, though transformed, carry a residue — an emotional imprint that lingers like dust on a photograph. My work begins in this uncertain territory: between memory and reconstruction, between what is remembered and what is feared to remember.

Memory has never been a safe space for me. It shifts like light through stained glass — distorted, fragmented, unreliable. What I recall is not the truth but an arrangement of emotions and visual traces. In this way, painting becomes my way of decoding these distortions — to see how beauty, paranoia, and trauma coexist on the same canvas.

Color, for me, is emotional language. It reveals and conceals. I use vibrant tones to suggest warmth, nostalgia, or childhood, but beneath them lies a darker pulse. The bright palette often serves as camouflage for discomfort — joy stretched over unease, affection cloaking anxiety. In that contrast, the work breathes. The colors become like siblings themselves — bound together, yet different; carrying the same history but each bearing their own wounds.

Many of the figures I paint resemble children. Their silhouettes are gentle, but their postures hold weight — as if burdened by the silence of what they cannot say. They represent not only my own fragmented memories but also the universal struggle to carry emotional inheritance. As children, we absorb the atmosphere around us — the whispers of conflict, the quiet tenderness, the paranoia of what might happen next. We learn to interpret love through gestures, tone, and distance. My paintings try to reconstruct that coded language — the one we grow up inside before we have words to name it.

The Shared Weight of Memory

The title Siblings Sharing the Load emerged from this realization: that memory is rarely individual. Our experiences, especially those of trauma or deep emotion, are often mirrored and echoed in the lives of those closest to us. My siblings and I, like many families, carried the same stories in different ways — some of us remembering vividly, others burying the pain in silence. The paintings in this series explore this delicate symmetry: how we each bear a part of the same past, unknowingly keeping one another upright.

In the compositions, figures often appear in pairs or groups, connected through subtle gestures — a hand resting on another’s shoulder, a shared gaze, a shadow that binds them. These are not literal portraits but emotional reflections of companionship, tension, and care. The shared load is not only grief, but also the tenderness that grows from it — the unspoken comfort of simply existing together in the aftermath.

Sometimes, paranoia seeps into these scenes. The eyes of the figures seem alert, waiting for something unseen to happen. This tension echoes how trauma lingers: never fully gone, always ready to resurface. The children become guardians of a collective secret, protectors of something fragile that even they cannot define. Within this tension, there is love — not romantic or idealized love, but the love of survival, of standing beside one another when the world feels unstable.

Painting as Reconstruction

Each painting begins as a quiet dialogue between me and the past. I do not plan them entirely — they unfold, layer by layer, as if memory itself were guiding my hand. I often start with fragments: a color that feels like a season, a shadow that reminds me of home, a shape that recalls a sound from childhood. These fragments merge into scenes that are neither real nor imagined, but something in between — the emotional truth that memory leaves behind when facts dissolve. Paranoia becomes both my theme and my tool. It’s the emotional vibration that keeps me questioning — was it really that way? Did it happen like this? Or have I invented the pain to make sense of something deeper? Through painting, I find comfort in uncertainty. The act of creating allows me to rebuild what trauma once dismantled — not to erase it, but to transform it into something visible, something tender.

Maternal camouflage, Oil  on linnen canvas 200 x 140 cm (2021)

Emotional Language and Silence

In Siblings Sharing the Load, silence plays a central role. The figures rarely speak; instead, their bodies communicate through gestures, posture, and color. This reflects the way emotional exchange often happens within families — silently, intuitively, without words. The quiet between siblings is sacred. It’s where understanding resides, even when language fails. I am fascinated by how siblings develop a private form of communication — a shared rhythm, a glance, a sigh. This unspoken language becomes a metaphor in my work for empathy and collective resilience. Even when separated, they remain intertwined by memory, bound by invisible threads of shared experience.

Soul struggles, Oil-paint on linnen canvas 150 x 100 cm (2021)

Hide and seek - Oil-paint on linnen canvas 100 x 100 cm (2021)

The Paradox of Nostalgia

There is danger in nostalgia. It tempts us with the illusion of safety, while hiding the unease of what actually occurred. I often revisit my own childhood imagery with both affection and suspicion — unsure if what I recall is love or fear. This contradiction drives my practice. To me, paranoia is not only anxiety; it’s awareness — the sharp edge of remembering too much. It allows me to question how the past continues to live in the present, how beauty can exist alongside pain. Through this lens, my paintings become both confessions and studies in endurance. The figures embody vulnerability but also defiance. They hold onto each other not just to remember, but to survive the remembering. Each image becomes a small act of reconciliation — an attempt to forgive the past for being imperfect, and to forgive myself for holding onto it.

Retrieval - Oil-paint on linnen canvas 90 x 80 cm (2021)

The act of creating a topic for debate and expressing thoughts through art is a complex process. Challenging someone's interpretation can lead to a nonlinear or repetitive experience. Reconstructing stories from our memories opens up a space for us to understand reality through the strokes of the brush and the influence of our present time. A close-up view of a painting provides enough information to comprehend the variables of the language being used. This close-up view is crucial as it represents the most significant values in the work itself, with everything outside the canvas presenting an opportunity to reinvent storytelling. The absence of borders at the beginning of interpretation allows for a continuous chronological aspect to the evolution of meaning. This starting point is a crucial part of research in the work, as it provides context for a narrative with different endings. This perspective highlights the importance of storytelling and personal narration as a necessity.