Outpouring

Oil on canvas, 142 × 215 cm

This painting explores the tension between how much of your life you pour into the world, whether it has meaning, and the fact that you can never fully know what remains of you.

The vessel can be read as the self, a finite container of life, spirit, time, energy and creativity. As she pours it into the ocean, she gives herself to something vast and unknowable, without any control over where it goes or what impact it will have. The incoming wave becomes another reminder that life does not wait until we have everything figured out. We pour ourselves out while moving through uncertainty, difficulty, loss and change.

It took five months to arrive at this version. I finished the painting many times, only to return to it and realise something was still unresolved. Each version had to be surrendered for the sake of the whole, and what you see now contains traces of every version that came before it.

The painting also marks a shift in my practice. After years of pursuing realism, I wanted to allow more of the process to remain visible through brushstrokes, unfinished edges and moments of spontaneity. I wanted the finished work to retain evidence of its making.

Perhaps that is what this painting ultimately became about: the process of becoming, and the impossibility of knowing exactly when we have arrived.

We pour ourselves into our work, our relationships, our ambitions and the lives we build, never knowing exactly what will remain of it all.

"Nothing is ever finished, only abandoned."