For many years, I worked as a psychotherapist. My professional life was built around understanding people, their histories, emotions, patterns, relationships and the stories they carried about themselves. It taught me an enormous amount about what it means to be human, but over time I began to realise that the identity I had built around that work no longer felt like the whole truth of who I was. I had spent years looking backwards. Understanding. Analysing. Making meaning from what had already happened.

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Eventually, I began to feel as though I was living too much in my mind. There was also a growing sense that I was performing an identity I had become very good at inhabiting rather than expressing the person I felt myself becoming. Creativity offered me another way.

Instead of analysing an experience, I could make something from it. Instead of explaining what something meant, I could respond to it through colour, movement, an image, a photograph or words. I didn't have to understand everything before I could create from it.

 

That shift has changed the way I think about both art and life. My transition into a multidisciplinary art practice has been less about becoming someone new and more about allowing another part of myself to take up more space. Painting, photography and writing give me different ways to explore what interests me without requiring everything to be resolved, explained or understood. There is freedom in that. I am learning to trust instinct over analysis, curiosity over certainty and creation over constant interpretation.

 

My practice is still evolving, and I want it to remain that way. I am interested in what happens when I stop trying to understand life from the outside and allow myself to participate in it, to notice, experiment, create and transform what I encounter into something of my own.

In many ways, becoming an artist has been a movement out of my head and back into life.