Mounted on Pinolithmagnesit · Porcelain · Underglaze & Overglaze Paintings · Transparent Matte Glaze · 24ct Gold
There are parts of us that learned to survive by becoming smaller. By folding inward. By hiding their colour beneath careful layers and waiting for a season that felt safe enough to arrive. This figure belongs to the moment after that waiting. The moment when something soft inside us begins to open and realizes, almost with surprise, that it no longer needs permission.
The peony knows this feeling. Before it becomes magnificent, it is a closed and secret thing. A small universe holding more petals than should be possible. Then one morning it can no longer contain itself. It opens and opens and opens, until beauty is no longer decoration but a kind of truth. Until abundance becomes the only honest shape it can take.
For centuries, the peony carried honour, prosperity and noble strength. It stood beside lions and protected their sleep. Its name remembered the healer of the gods. And still, somewhere within all that splendour, it carried bashfulness—the strange tenderness of being seen when one has spent so long hiding. Perhaps that is why the flower feels so human. It is both magnificent and shy. It wants to fill the entire room and trembles when the room looks back.
This figure carries that contradiction. She is not becoming harder in order to become strong. She is becoming more herself. Petal after petal, softness after softness, she discovers that tenderness can have weight. That beauty can protect. That taking up space does not have to mean taking it away from anyone else.
Beneath her, Pinolithmagnesit holds pale forms inside dark stone, like closed blossoms waiting beneath the surface of night. The stone remembers pressure. It remembers transformation taking place where no light could witness it. And still it emerged patterned with something resembling seeds, petals, small white beginnings. As if even the earth could not keep its inner garden hidden forever.
The peony disappears completely into winter and returns from what appears to be nothing. Not cautiously. Not halfway. It returns carrying impossible fullness. Larger, older, more certain of its place in the world. Maybe the soul returns like this too. Not unchanged, but deepened. Not untouched, but finally willing to be visible.
This work wanted to remember that healing does not always look quiet. Sometimes healing is colour. Sometimes it is fragrance, excess, laughter, gold, and a hundred petals unfolding at once. Sometimes healing is the moment you stop asking whether you are too much and begin wondering who taught you to become so little.
She stands there now, rooted in darkness and covered in bloom. Still tender. Still becoming. But no longer hiding the beautiful scale of what she contains.
you were never too much. you were becoming visible.
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