My daughter got really sick. I didn’t paint for about three years, while I put my energies into my daughter.

So for me, it was something I’d always wanted to do, but it made sense to wait until I was less distracted. And now I’m able to put all that emotional energy into my art practice so I’ve gone back to school, studying art full time. This year, I’ll do Honors. I may come back and do a Masters.

So in painting this year, I wanted to explore… catching a glimpse of something as you as you walk past, that fleeting, unexpected encounter. A metaphor of the human journey through difficult times…what gives you hope is when you catch a glimpse of something, the idea that things could be different. So this painting was about sitting with darkness rather than running away; just learning to sit with uncomfortable things; uncontrollable things. I used medium that I’ve never used before in the hope that it would take some of the control away from me. Even less control was going into lockdown, and I was at home without any paints. What was I going to paint with my one jar of blue pigment?

I had a book on the history of colour and read about making bone white from burning chicken bones and I thought oh we had chicken for tea tonight and the fire is still going… so I ended up making my own pigments. The white is ground up chicken bones. Some of the grayer black is ground charcoal; the dark black is dark chicken bones. If you look really close at the dark I mixed a bit of Mica in with it so it’s got a bit of shine, just wee sparkles; like some sort of spiritual encounter with light. Because when you sit with the dark, tolerate the uncomfortable, you begin to see things around you and encounter moments of beauty, glimmers of hope.”