art diary page #20 - where is the land?

The act of painting is, at times, an act of excavation. Layers of memory, history, and personal mythology converge on the surface, forming something both deeply intimate and expansive. In ‘A Private Cathedral for the Rituals of the Land’, this process unfolds as a meditation on belonging—a physical and emotional return to the shifting terrain of identity.

The work resists the rigidity of imposed structures, instead embracing a fluid, organic motion that challenges the very notion of fixed borders—geographical, historical, and psychological. The forms that emerge are simultaneously geometric and unruly, expanding and retracting as if caught in a state of negotiation. There is an inherent friction here between discipline and instinct, the familiar and the unknown, the act of remembering and the inevitable process of transformation.

In this space of tension, the work asks me back: how does one truly inhabit a landscape that is always in flux? Can we ever fully reclaim what was lost, or do we continuously reinvent the terms of our own belonging?

What suddenly became clear was that the process of painting became a ritual to communicate with history, tracing the contours of identity through pigment and form. I realise the work settled only when it became a site of reimagination, where the colours of the land and the waters are present, yet forming a strange unruly space. I look at the composition and I see it was sculpted from many questions and not many answers - in a persistent search for my identity in the sometimes precise, often contradictory gestures forming the work.