“Quiet Bloom of Memory” began with something very simple: a plant in a vase against an ochre wall. What interested me was not the object itself, but how it could hold the feeling of a place that no longer exists in front of me, except as an inner afterimage. The plant is rendered almost like a ghost — pale, airy, its leaves dissolving into the background — while the vase is dense, weighty, and earthbound. Behind them, the yellow–orange grid on the red wall functions as both architectural pattern and mental scaffolding: a structure that tries to hold together something essentially unstable, the way memory attempts to order fragments of experience.
The work was made during my residency in Morocco. Rather than “painting Morocco” directly, I wanted to let only the sensation remain: heat in the red ground, ornamental pattern reduced to a faint lattice, plant forms that feel halfway between domestic décor and a small, private garden. In that sense, the painting is less a still life than a compressed landscape of remembrance, where the true subject is the atmosphere of a room remembered from a distance.
My practice is rooted in memory-driven images that sit somewhere between landscape, still life and interior. I draw on writers like W.G. Sebald and Marcel Proust, who show how the past is never retrieved whole, but continually reconstructed through small sensory triggers. Philosophically, I am close to a phenomenological view of memory: we don’t simply “recall” the past, we remake it in the present through perception. In “Quiet Bloom of Memory,” this appears in the way colour refuses realism — the red background is too saturated, the greens of the vase too deep, the plant too light to be plausible — yet together they feel emotionally true. The image is built not from observation but from the way the scene insists in my mind.
Formally and materially, the painting extends the concerns of my wider practice: using bold, non-naturalistic palettes, flattening and simplifying forms, and letting the surface remain visibly worked so that time and revision are present in the image. Even though this piece is more stripped back than some of my larger, multi-layered landscapes, it is representative of my work because it treats a modest motif as a vessel for longing and displacement. The plant is a stand‑in for the fragile persistence of a memory; the vase and grid hold it in place, just as I use painting to hold onto places that are always receding. In that way, “Quiet Bloom of Memory” is a quiet, concentrated statement of what I am trying to do as an artist: turn the ordinary into a site where remembered time can bloom again.
