These paintings are an exploration of the body as a place we live in, not an object to be looked at. Through close cropping and fluid, abstracted form, a breast becomes a hillside, a fold of skin becomes a river, a thigh becomes shoreline. I am interested in the intimate geography of a real, adult female body — its weight, its softness, its creases and curves — rendered with tenderness rather than critique. Working in soft washes of peach, pink, and blue, with touches of gold, I want to reclaim the nude as a site of self-witnessing. Water appears again and again as a metaphor for being held, for renewal, for fluidity. This work is about permission: to take up space, to be soft and still powerful, to see our own bodies as sacred landscapes.

Intimate Cartographies is a series of cropped, faceless nudes — watercolour and acrylic studies that treat flesh as terrain. Working from my own body, I’m interested in what happens when we monumentalize the parts we’re taught to minimize. The palette of ochre, rose, slate and sea blue, with fine topographic line and gold, is both tender and territorial: this body is a place, and it is enough.