My mixed-media work explores the relationship between memory, mortality and the ordinary objects that outlive us. Grief then, is explored not in terms of absence, but through reflecting on what remains: the objects we keep, the stories we attach to them, and the way memory continues to move long, and how these fragments and experiences continue to speak long after someone or something is gone.

I combine painting, collage and drawing to create imagined scenes in which animals become unlikely carriers of human experience. In one work, a mallard travels with a suitcase and a copy of the Dutch book Dood gaan kun je leren (You can learn to die). In another, the spines of a hedgehog are made from fragments of stories, suggesting how the experiences we gather become part of us. Together, the works ask what remains when someone is gone, and whether the stories we leave behind can continue to accompany those who find them.

I am drawn to grief's contradictions: the coexistence of loss and attachment, sadness and tenderness, even joy, gravity and absurdity. The work leaves space for these tensions rather than trying to resolve them.

Collage is important to this process because memory itself can feel like a form of collage: incomplete, layered and constantly rearranged. Books, clothing, scraps of text and small possessions become repositories of identity, while humour and absurdity sit deliberately alongside mortality.

My wider practice centres on memory, legacy and the traces people leave behind, exploring how ordinary things gathered over a lifetime can become small vessels for remembrance.