“The leaf of a tree is the endless effort of the earth to speak with the sky.”
Rabindranath Tagore

This entire body of work was born in the days of lockdown, and it carries within it a personal attempt to move through that extraordinary time. Mine was an undeniably privileged gaze: in the slow drift of those suspended hours, I was given the gift of being free — free to immerse myself in nature, to forge with it a pact of knowledge,
intimacy, and trust.

Everything stopped, but only on the outside. The soul expanded — dancing with the trees and the wind, taking leaves by the hand, growing lighter, finding its way back to itself. Through that close, unhurried looking, every leaf conjured a gesture, a line, a colour reaching for its essence. Archetypal female forms began to emerge, merging with nature, penetrating it, until they dissolved entirely into it.

I imagine this is something like what the women of ancient Lydia once felt — surrendering to the languid, erotic movements of the Kordax, the ecstatic female dance, until they could sense within themselves the resonant, harmonious sensuality of the Great Mother.