I am a British-Romanian artist working across painting, drawing, poetry and moving image. My practice examines displacement, memory, loss and belonging, and the ways in which personal experience can become entangled with histories that extend beyond the individual.
Born in Bucharest, Romania, and adopted into a British family, my work has developed from an enduring search for a sense of home and resolution.
Romania exists within this search as both an origin and an absence: a place inherited through fragments, imagination, memory and return. Cornwall, where I now live and work, has gradually become another landscape through which I explore questions of belonging, settlement and identity.
At the centre of my practice is an interest in the human psyche and in whether experiences of trauma, separation and loss can ever be fully resolved. Increasingly, however, my work accepts that resolution may not be possible — or even necessary. Instead, painting becomes a space in which contradictory experiences can exist alongside one another: beauty and grief, intimacy and distance, belonging and displacement, remembering and forgetting.
There is a connection here with the thinking of painter and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger, particularly her conception of the Matrixial Borderspace: a psychic and aesthetic space in which the boundaries between self and other become permeable without disappearing altogether. Ettinger’s ideas of wit(h)nessing and borderlinking propose that trauma and memory need not belong exclusively to a single, isolated subject.
We can encounter and carry traces of experiences beyond ourselves while never claiming those experiences entirely as our own.
For me, this offers a way of understanding the fragments that continually return throughout my practice. Personal memories sit alongside inherited histories; Romanian landscapes encounter the wilderness of West Cornwall; folklore, religious imagery, family, absence and imagined histories become intertwined.
My work does not attempt to reconstruct a complete autobiography.
Instead, these fragments occupy a shifting psychological territory between what has been experienced, what has been inherited, what has disappeared and what has been imagined.
My process of making reflects this movement. Images often begin as fragments before passing through writing and drawing. Drawing represents a fundamental, immediate state: an attempt to locate or understand an image. Painting becomes something different.
Through repeated addition and subtraction, covering and uncovering, an image gradually separates itself from its source.
Oil paint is important to me because this process cannot be completely reversed. Every alteration leaves something behind. Even when an image disappears beneath another layer, a trace of its former existence remains within the painting.
In this sense, my paintings operate almost as psychological surfaces. They do not illustrate trauma or memory directly; they allow their traces to accumulate.
This also brings my practice close to Ettinger’s idea of metramorphosis, in which meaning emerges through transformation, connection and encounter rather than through the preservation of a fixed identity. My paintings similarly resist a final, stable reading. Figures, landscapes, horizons and remembered images move into and through one another until their origins become uncertain.
The recurring horizon within my paintings becomes particularly significant. It suggests a boundary, but also the possibility of crossing one. These painted spaces can feel simultaneously familiar and unreachable — little worlds that appear close enough to enter yet remain elsewhere.
Ultimately, my work is less concerned with representing a past than with understanding what remains of it.
Painting becomes a form of wit(h)nessing: an encounter with traces of experience without demanding that they become whole again. Rather than offering resolution, my work creates a space in which loss, memory and belonging can remain unfinished.
Perhaps acceptance lies not in recovering what has been lost, but in learning how to exist alongside its trace.