It’s someone else’s turn 2026 – 32,2 x 29,4cm, watercolour, acrylic, spray paint, coloured pencil, on paper
The title is taken from The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. The acknowledgment that the speaking cannot continue indefinitely with the same voice, that the address must be yielded, that the turn passes. The one who has the floor steps back. The clamouring continues.
The work subverts the still life arrangement, the vase of flowers as the genre’s central convention, by giving it a platform and an audience. The dark plant form stands on a slope in the lower left, its silhouette darker than everything surrounding it, its interior detail suppressed against the lit field behind: the figure at the podium, the speaker against the light, the protagonist whose address the series has been building toward across thirteen years of displaced figures and witness flowers. Here the flower does not replace the figure. It becomes the figure, standing on its raised ground, occupying the floor.
Behind and around it, the audience presses for view, circular outlined blooms competing for position, pink and red marks urgent and overlapping, pencil forms reaching from the right, the yellow disc holding its position in the upper left. The white centre is the spotlight, the point of maximum luminosity from which attention radiates outward into the deep magenta field. The magenta is not the series’ administrative pink of managed optimism. It is the colour of the protest flare, the demonstration, the public stage at the moment of maximum heat, something that has been building pressure and has found its occasion.
The dark lower register, absolute, decisive, the stage’s shadow or the silence before the next speaker, anchors the work with a totalizing finality. The slope emerges from it as the only connection between the dark ground and the lit world above, the platform from which the address was made, from which the floor is now being yielded.
The Dutch still life tradition organised its flowers for contemplation, the arrangement composed, ordered, the blooms disposed for the viewing pleasure of the collector. This work dissolves the arrangement into address. The flowers are not displayed. They are speaking, or they have just finished speaking, or they are clamouring to speak next. The vase has become a podium. The bouquet has become an assembly.
It’s someone else’s turn. The dark plant steps back from the slope. The clamouring forms press forward. The magenta holds its heat. The turn passes to whoever is next.