Final year at uni. End of the year, last tutorials with tutors just before the degree show. I’m sitting with my tutor in his office. He’s going through my ‘development file,’ probably trying to make some connections with my previous work. His face is concerned. He goes: you go from one extreme to another… people won’t recognise you. I reply, with naivety and joy on my face: is that a bad thing?

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Still. His words haunt me to this day, every single time I take another turn to another extreme.

Almost a decade later, I admit to myself that any attempt to stop this organic changing is self-destructive. So I play around with it.

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Another couple of years, and I have a bunch of material - sketches, rubbings, phone and film photographs, experiments with ink and pigments… all hardly to be seen as a solid, bound body of work. And his words echo in my head again. No! I won’t give up or choose one or another, and I won’t attempt to develop a style. Instead! I will put everything in one! And since it is winter, digital art will be perfect for the season.

And so I end up with yet another extreme - a series of illustrations that look like scenes from animated films.

 

Although the works are digital, they’re also very physical due to the process of gathering colour and texture, i.e. rubbings, which were used as the core layer onto which other elements are added: digitally drawn lines, shading, and film photography noise.

The physical material is transferred into a digital space, merging opposites and forming a vibrant unity.

The scenarios are half accidental, half intentional. Each piece was composed using collage techniques - juggling different sketches around until the right fit appears: aha! And I’m left surprised by the beauty of the scene myself. So I lean into it, deliberately choosing horizontal, open compositions with space for the viewer to feel like there’s more, or that another scene might follow, revealing the most sensitive or the weirdest scenarios. Only, they don’t really exist.

 

2025