A room prepares itself to receive. The door opens, the space clears, and the guest arrives. The guest gives the host a reason to open, a purpose for the prepared room. Over time, the positions blur. Traces are left-a scent, an impression. Something is given; something is taken. The exchange is never even.
To make is to negotiate. Canvas pulled tight, stretched across a frame. Glue made from animal collagen applied warm, staining the weave-pigment going *into* the surface rather than sitting on top of it. As the material dries it contracts, tightens, becomes drum-taut. Push and pull. Twist and turn. Layer and extract. The material has its own behaviours, its own timing. Work fast when the glue is wet; slow down when adhesion allows. A rhythm emerges between what is proposed and what is refused.
The studio accumulates. Offcuts pile in corners. Failed experiments persist. The debris of one project becomes raw material for another-brought back, folded in, given new accommodation. Nothing is entirely finished; nothing is entirely waste.
Space is not neutral. A wall is not just a surface to hang upon but a field to occupy, to interrupt, to draw into conversation. Painting opens outward-toward architecture, toward the body moving through a room. A painting can hold you in place or send you around a corner.
Objects hold something back. You can look at a thing, handle it, describe it in detail, and still something remains. This reserve is not a limit but a resource: what withdraws from one encounter may reveal itself in another; what seems inert alone may prove volatile in combination. The opacity of things is also their ability to surprise, to enter arrangements we couldn't predict.
There is pleasure in this. The reveal of a form, the unexpected conversation between elements, the moment when materials do something unplanned. Experimentation is not grim labour. Questions are posed through material, form, and structure-and sometimes answered through continued making. What sustains curiosity is that objects keep offering more than we knew to ask for.