21 May 2025
Earlier this week I was walking near my studio and noticed a small instant film photo lying facedown in the street. I turned it over and found an overexposed image of two young children standing arm in arm in front of a thick green mass of wall ivy. The whole photo is washed out, but the brightest part is the children's bodies, their forms fused and obscured by a concentration of white light so intense that it renders their facial features undetectable save for slight indications of eyes on the taller of the two.
It's arresting, and it feels familiar; not only does it echo Noah Davis's Mary Jane, a work I internalized after a formative visit to the Underground Museum a few years ago, but its formal elements also align with my painting Ground (the one of Yena spreading a blanket over grass), which I had just started to sketch at the time I discovered it.
When I was trying to find a way into that painting, my main reference was a day where I had an especially challenging morning shift before taking a long, sun-baked bus ride across London to meet Yena at Kennington Park. Watching her make a space in the cool shade of a big tree gave me a jolt of what later came through that photo—waves of softness punctuated by an acute pang of finitude. That's pretty close to what Ground holds for me.