reminds me of the flesh, 2025
unpacked bags, 2025 (oil on board, 22.9cm x 30.5cm)
dough, 2025 (oil on board, 22.9cm x 30.5cm)
rubble, 2025 (oil on board, 22.9cm x 30.5cm)
Inspired by my poem “Living in the Clutter,” these paintings explore the anxiety, loneliness and entrapment of being back in my teenage bedroom that isn’t mine anymore, where my eating disorder first began.
Living in the Clutter:
Living in the clutter
Of unpacked suitcases and books in boxes
My paintings rolled up, canvas and paper in every corner
Gathering dust
Speckled with lint and cobwebs
My bed-frame, broken
Sagging mattress
Blankets that drape across what’s left of the floor.
My room,
Not mine, not quite
Childhood memories linger in the overflowing wardrobe
Leaking out nostalgia
And the feeling of adolescent claustrophobia-
I’m trapped again.
Boredom clings to my skin
Humid and itchy,
Waiting and waiting.
It’s not that I want to escape
But that I’ve realised I need to.
I am not myself here, anymore.
I wonder if I ever was.
The old stone walls and empty fields
Close in on me, swallow me
Swimming in a void of weak stomach acid
That cannot digest me-
It just swells my flesh
And flares up my skin,
Brings forth the familiar ache in my bones
As my creativity turns to sludge,
A spectrum of colours I learned to love
Muddied by the smudge of graphite
And a loss of words.
I sit on the floor and look up at the plaster of my ceiling,
Watching it peeling,
Deterioration is a radiation
I cannot escape from
Like the walls with their holes and stains
The state of my brain,
My trudging steps and rumbling belly
My eyes a pale shade of blue, watering over
As I pick at a spot in the mirror
And dissociate away from my reflection
Until I am just a spirit, a vague concept of a human,
Orbiting my body as it hangs from the jaw of time,
Like I’m stuck in the teeth of the universe
Even out-of-body I am still HERE
Tethered to my hopelessness
The uncertain clouds that blur out my future
If I sit here any longer,
Living in the clutter,
I think it might smother me, for good.