‘In September 2018 I was walking home in my favorite sky blue dress. A silhouette approached me and began to hold and grab me. As I screamed and struggled to get free, I felt a piercing sense of my own mortality. When I woke up the next morning my mind had sunk into a fog of disillusionment and emptiness.
Over the following weeks, I tried to go back to my life gently but I had become distant, glazed and robotic. The shock had been like a bomb going off in my brain. I lost my memory. All of the colour and light in the world had been swept away in one stroke and I experienced everything as a blank two-dimensional void.
Bleak months passed. Pain folded in on itself. Deterioration and destruction were my friends. I hid myself away as much as possible. I doubted my desire to continue existing.
One day at the beginning of Spring, I lay in bed. I noticed something for what felt like the first time: the painting that I always stared into. Its rough shapes and energetic splashes. I remembered applying each layer of paint, taking excitement and joy in how unpredictable the liquid was.
I remembered how my desired outcome and the chaos of the paint itself met and danced together on the canvas. I remembered the awe and wonder that the volatile pigments always inspired in me.
Within a week new paintings had emerged. Within two months I was holding the key to my own art studio. As I opened the door and walked through I felt a sense of invincibility. Somehow the whole universe was in that space and I was put here it explore its mysteries.
Chaos would happen but I could embrace it. I could invite in accidents and blemishes and I could make them beautiful.’