“Somewhere Our Childhood Is Still Walking Home” is a landscape of memory rather than a description of a specific place. The work began with a simple question that recurs in my practice: what if the places we once knew continue without us, still holding the echo of our small footsteps, our fears, our wonder? In this painting, I wanted to catch that sensation of being on the edge between day and night, safety and strangeness, belonging and distance—the feeling of walking home as a child, when the road seemed endless and familiar at the same time.
The piece was created at a moment when I was thinking intensely about nostalgia, displacement, and what “home” really means. I live and work in a rural environment, and I spend a lot of time walking and observing how light falls on fields, paths, and small clusters of buildings. Those observations are the starting point, but I never try to reproduce an actual scene. Instead, I reconstruct a place that exists partly in lived experience and partly in imagination. The landscape in this work is an amalgam of roads I’ve walked, villages I’ve passed through, and the afterimage of childhood journeys that no longer exist except in memory.
Formally, this painting reflects the core of my artistic practice. I work from memory, using bold, sometimes unconventional colour to prioritise emotional truth over optical accuracy. Instead of building the image on pristine canvas, I often paint on found or non-traditional supports such as cardboard, packaging, or old printed surfaces. This introduces traces of previous lives—creases, text, imperfections—that quietly anchor the work in both personal and anonymous histories. In “Somewhere Our Childhood Is Still Walking Home,” the layered surface and visible textures mirror the way memory itself is layered, fragile, and partial.
My background in photography also plays a role: I think in terms of light, framing, and the tension between foreground and distance, but I deliberately subvert photographic logic. Horizons shift, perspectives slip, and details blur, because memory is not a sharp image—it is a feeling. In this work, the path does not simply lead to a clearly defined house or destination; instead, it dissolves into atmosphere, asking the viewer to project their own sense of “home” into the scene.
This painting is representative of my practice because it stands at the intersection of several ongoing concerns: the relationship between place and memory, the way fiction and lived experience blur into one another, and the quiet drama of everyday journeys. Rather than offering a specific narrative, I’m inviting viewers to recognise a sensation: that uncanny mix of comfort and unease we carry from childhood, the awareness that somewhere in us, a younger self is still out there on the road, walking home through the dusk.
