Other who had always known me 2026 – 24 x 18cm, acrylic, spray paint on canvas
The presence that precedes memory, the knowledge of the self that comes from outside the self, extending back before the self was formed. Not the company that arrives. The one that has always been there.
The painting is a room known in darkness, at an hour when the familiar becomes something adjacent to itself. The dark teal ground has been lived in, the brushmarks directional, the atmosphere inhabited rather than imposed.
In the upper right, a shelf carries a warm yellow light around a dark silhouetted form, flower, bird, flame, the thing that has always occupied that corner at that hour. The light illuminates nothing beyond itself. It doesn’t need to. It is the light of a space that has always known where everything is.
Below, a tilted green surface holds an orange form and a single red poppy on its stem, modest, specific, the objects of a room that remembers them without being asked. On the left, the blue globe in its wire cradle: the series’ recurring instrument of communication, here smaller and more intimate than elsewhere, a private device in a private space. The orange and white striped vertical at the left edge, a column, a door frame, a mark that has always been there, completes the room without explaining it.
The other who had always known me is not a person. It is a room, at night, with its light on in the corner, familiar before the remembering begins.