Start of summer 2026
I still wasn't trying to become an artist.
I was painting because I had started painting again, and apparently that was enough reason to keep going. One idea led to another. Some works started with something I wanted to practise, others with something I couldn't quite put into words yet. There wasn't a plan pinned to the wall somewhere, no carefully thought-out concept and definitely no intention of turning any of it into a series.
I was just making things. But somewhere during the summer, the separate pieces started to look less separate.
The magpie had been waiting for me since winter. What began as a technical problem — figuring out how to paint those black feathers without ruining the whole thing — had already pushed me back towards painting. From there came other experiments, old materials I wanted to reuse, images that stayed in my head long enough to become something physical.
Without really noticing it, I kept returning to the same things.
I was following ideas.
Only when there started to be more than one, and then more than a few, did I begin to notice that they weren't quite as random as I had assumed.
Not because they looked the same. They didn't.
But they had come from the same place, during the same period, while I was slowly finding my way back into making things again.
Apparently, without deciding to, I was making a series.
I just didn't know what it was yet.
May turned into June and I kept making. Not with a schedule or a finished idea of where any of it was going, but simply because there always seemed to be a next thing. Something I wanted to try, something I had lying around that could become something else, or an idea that made enough sense in my head to see what would happen if I actually made it.
That was still the extent of the plan.
And maybe that was exactly why it worked.
For once, I wasn't trying to decide what all of this was supposed to become while I was still doing it. I wasn't building a portfolio or preparing a collection. I wasn't thinking about how the work would fit together on a wall somewhere. Most of it didn't even begin with the thought that it had to become a finished artwork.
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