Gathering Around Silence

I begin from a place that exists before form. From something inward and difficult to define — a quiet pull, a certain atmosphere, a subtle shift that asks to be followed before it can be understood.

I entered this painting from a place of deep inner calm. There was no urgency to know where it was going. Instead, I was able to remain fully within the process, allowing it to unfold without needing to direct or explain it too soon.

Gathering Around Silence grew from that state — not as an attempt to translate something already known, but as a way of staying close to what was quietly taking shape beneath the surface.

What interested me was not silence as emptiness, but silence as a place in which something gathers before it becomes visible. A place where fragments, traces and gestures begin to move towards one another without yet forming a fixed shape.

There is a circular movement in the painting, but it never fully closes. It remains incomplete, interrupted, open. I did not want a perfect form. I wanted something closer to the way inner life actually moves: gathering, dispersing, returning, changing direction.

Because silence is not empty.

Silence is where things begin to gather before they have a name.

The diptych format became part of that feeling. The painting is divided in two, yet it does not separate. The line between the canvases remains visible like a quiet fracture, a pause, a breath. Above it, the image feels lighter, more distant, more uncertain. Below it, there is more weight, more gravity, more of the body.

Neither canvas can fully exist without the other.

Perhaps that is also true of the things we carry within us. The visible and the hidden. The thought and the feeling. The moment before something appears, and the moment after we recognise it.

Gathering Around Silence is not a painting about silence as absence. It is about silence as a place of becoming.

A place where something is slowly, quietly, gathering around a centre that remains open.

And perhaps that is enough.