I drew these in the lobby of a hostel in Paris, during a stretch of eight months when I didn't have a home of my own, I was moving between places, dependent on the kindness of hosts who let me stay a little longer than they had to. There was a particular kind of stillness in those lobbies: not quite belonging, not quite passing through either. Just waiting, watching the door, half-listening to other people's goodbyes.

Strings of paper banners hung overhead, left up from some party long since over, swaying every time someone came in from the cold. I started tracing them without really meaning to, and they kept turning into something else under my hand: geometric ribbons that twist, fall, hold their shape, and repeat. They imply movement and yet are still at the same time.

That's what I want these pieces to hold: the particular ache and grace of being untethered. Of not having a fixed place, and slowly realizing that doesn't mean you're lost. If you've ever lived between homes — by choice or not — and come out the other side changed, softer, more yours, this one's for you.

This one started as an exercise, almost a dare to myself: what happens if I let Matisse's cut-outs collide with something completely different, like the chaos and color of a coral reef? I wasn't trying to depict anything literally. I just kept cutting and placing shapes until the canvas felt like everything in it was caught mid-current, drifting past each other without quite touching.

The black silhouettes of leaves could be coral fans or could be shadow-puppets of something else entirely; I genuinely don't know, and I like that it's ambiguous. The whole thing is built from collage logic: flat shapes, hard edges, color blocks that shouldn't work together but somehow do, the way a reef shouldn't look so wild, and yet it's exactly right.

This piece was just a fun exercise for some wall art for my home office. No grand statement, just the joy of letting shapes talk to each other on a page. Sometimes that's enough.

I drew these during an 8-month-long st retch in France, in between sending out applications that mostly went nowhere. It was the kind of job hunt that starts to feel less like a search and more like waiting for a verdict. Anxiety was much too close for comfort in those days.

On one of those long, uneventful days, I found myself staring at a handful of bobby pins on the table in front of me, and I couldn't look away.

There's something almost absurd about how much beauty is packed into something so mundane: the way light catches the curve of the metal, the way the geometry bends and overlaps, the shadows they throw that are somehow more interesting than the object itself. I started drawing them obsessively, layering line over line and point upon point, until the page became its own tangle, dotted shading standing in for the light I couldn't otherwise hold onto.

Looking back, I think I needed those pins more than I realized. They were the proof that even when nothing else was working out, I could still find something worth paying attention to.

That's the feeling I want these to carry: the quiet, almost stubborn beauty in ordinary things, especially the ones you notice when you have nowhere else to be.

Drawing 02 in the series - see Drawing 01 for full narrative

Drawing 03 in the series - see Drawing 01 for full narrative

This one is really about the tension between two kinds of marks: the ones that know exactly where they're going, and the ones that don't.

The diagonal lines are more deliberately structured, crossing each other at angles that create their own quiet order. Then the blobs: they don't care about any of that. They scatter and pool and land wherever they want, in colors that push against each other: green, navy, red, that unsubtle pale yellow.

The result is a canvas holding a web of tension. The lines hold their ground while the blobs spill past them anyway. I let both things be true at once, without forcing one to dominate.

I think a lot of us live like this. We are structured on the surface, yet quietly unruly underneath. There's no contradiction to fix.

This piece is for anyone who's stopped trying to choose between the two and found something more honest on the other side.