Conceptual Point of Departure
Years ago, I visited the Clarence Bicknell Museum in Bordighera, Italy. The garden surrounding it felt less like a collection and more like a living experiment- plants gathered from elsewhere, adapting, blossoming, remembering.
There was one tree I couldn’t stop looking at. A Ficus macrophylla, brought from Oceania more than 150 years ago. It was old, yet it looked ancient-almost as if it had outlived its own time. What unsettled me was its rhythm. It turned green in autumn and shed its leaves in spring, following seasons that no longer existed around it. As if its body still belonged to another place.
I had learned about such phenomena years earlier, in biology classes- how plants retain traces of their original environments. But standing there, this knowledge shifted. It became physical. The tree was not remembering in a narrative sense; it was remembering through behaviour, through timing, through form. Origin was not behind it. It was active.
That moment altered how I understood memory. I began to think of it not as something stored in the mind, but as something carried- embedded in bodies, landscapes, materials. Movement does not erase origin; it redistributes it. Departure does not dissolve place - it transforms into resonance. .
This encounter stayed with me. It continues to shape how I think about identity, displacement, and continuity- about how origin persists, quietly, across time and place. The Origins grew from this moment: an attempt to listen to what emerges.
The Origines Conceptual Framework
The Origins explores origin not as a single beginning, but as something layered, drifting, and continuously unfolding. Rather than belonging to the past, origin lingers- quietly active in the present - shaping how we perceive, remember, and become.
The works approach identity as a process in motion. It is not fixed or singular, but formed through geography, inheritance, repetition, and displacement. Identity emerges through time and interaction, always provisional, always shifting, held together by traces rather than certainties.
At the heart of the series is the idea of geographical memory. In nature, plants retain encoded information from their original environments: soil, climate, light - even after they are moved elsewhere. This phenomenon becomes a metaphor for human experience. The paintings suggest that we, too, carry embodied memories of earlier conditions, impressions that persist beneath conscious recall and travel with us beyond physical place.
The paintings resist direct representation. They unfold as interior landscapes. It is constructed through abstraction, layering, and fragmentation. Meaning does not appear all at once; it gathers slowly, through resonance and repetition. Memory is not presented as a story, but as a field: porous, unstable, and continuously rearranging itself.
Colour operates as the primary language of the work. Freed from descriptive function, it becomes a vessel for affect and remembrance- capable of evoking atmosphere, sensation, and emotional residue. Through colour, the paintings gesture toward experiences that resist language: temperature, scent, weight, and mood.
The Origins does not seek to define where something begins. Instead, it holds origin in suspension - understood as relational, shifting, and alive. An ongoing negotiation between past and present, perception and time.