Acrylic Ink on Water colour paper

29x38cm. €280. Payment in installments is always an option ✨

I’m writing this from a shopping center café while my son is at a birthday party. I have cotton wool stuffed in my ears because I’m feeling incredibly sensitive to the onslaught of sound. Of course it feels like being underwater. Everything is muffled but I can still hear ‘let it snow, let it snow, let it snow’. I am suddenly reminded of a hotel my now husband and I stayed in in Hong Kong, chosen solely for the fact that it had a swimming pool with underwater music (he has always been supportive of my whims). The swimming pool was outside on one of the top floors, but it didn’t feel like it was outdoors as the sky seemed to be perpetually a solid beige colour without a whisper of wind. You could see school children playing in a yard which was also not on the ground floor. As a consequence of a very accidental night out on the town, trying to sing karaoke in Chinese in a bar for all the people who finished work late in the service industry, most of the experience was utterly surreal. While my husband sensibly stayed in bed to recover I made myself swim in the pool and hear the underwater music. Later I trekked across the city up in an incredibly steep tram and multiple escalators to the viewing platform of a building to get a view of it all. I almost went down on my hands and knees and backwards back down. In the days before Google maps, (did I even have a phone?) I have no idea how I got back to the hotel through one of its many access points underground in a shopping mall. I picked up some noodles for both of us and didn’t leave the hotel again until our taxi came to bring us to the airport the next day. We only recovered from our hangovers half way through our few days in Sydney.

I had not intended to tell this story but I am weirdly reminded of that strange, disorienting, dizzy, beautiful adventure.

I am feeling and hoping it’s time to come up out of the water. The Undine’s in these paintings all have red nail varnish, last remnants of their time in the human world. By the time they return there it has washed off. They start afresh.