"Journey: from looking to seeing" is a browser work that turns my two painted cycles into four rooms you move through — a descent, a turning, an ascent, and a witness wall. It is built from the paintings and the poems written beside them, and together they trace a Jungian arc of individuation I understood only in retrospect.
It is not made to be looked at but to be entered: each room asks you to find something of yourself in it, until the work is no longer about the paintings but about the person standing before them — until you see yourself.
The rooms:
The descent is Journey of Acceptance — The Core Trilogy: Lethe's protective forgetting, Tyche's ache for the fortune that came to us and was not taken, and Ananke's confrontation with what can no longer be deferred — a falling that ends in permission. The ascent is Becoming One — Journey of Recognition: five goddesses — Theia, Aphrodite, Sophrosyne, Persephone, Euphrosyne — and five thresholds of identity, desire, balance, choice, and joy.
Between them is the mirror room — the crossing from darkness toward light, where we feel most secluded, and where ten questions arrive in the dark. The witness wall is the last room: a space for sharing after the rebirth, where each visitor leaves one honest sentence and, for the first time, is not alone — so the work is never the same twice, because it is written by whoever enters.
Every painting and every colour here is real: These are my own canvases, photographed from the work itself and shifting under real light — not digital filters, not generated images. Nothing is fake. I mix metallic pigment into the paint, so the surface answers to light: the painting at dawn is not the painting at midnight, and in the rooms you choose the hue light, and the same painting refuses to stay one colour — changing for you, and not for the next person who looks. The music arrived while I was painting, found at the easel, and the poems were written in the same moment as the brushwork.
One question has organised my work since childhood. The paintings ask it inside a frame; a performance asks it in a public square; here the screen asks it of you, alone: do we see the same colour at all?
Disclaimer:
I , Simona Ray, hereby declare that all creative works submitted as part of this competition entry — including all photographs, videos, poems, and paintings — are entirely and exclusively my own original intellectual property. No artificial intelligence tools were used in the creation, composition, editing, or production of any of these artworks.
The website presenting these works was conceived and designed by me. Its technical implementation was assisted by Claude (Anthropic) as a development tool; all creative direction, design decisions, and artistic content remain solely my own.
The sole outstanding licensing matter relates to background music streamed via YouTube on each webpage. I am actively engaged in negotiating direct licensing agreements with the respective artists and am committed to paying royalties directly to them for the use of their work. This reflects my personal commitment to fairly compensating artists directly rather than through intermediary platforms. In the meantime, I have dedicated a page within this submission to formally crediting each musician whose work appears on the site, along with all others who supported me throughout this journey.
I confirm that no other third-party intellectual property has been knowingly incorporated into this submission without appropriate authorization.
Simona Ray
30.06.2026
