Coal Miner’s Daughter

This painting began as a meditation on labour and inheritance — the way a face can carry the weight of the work that came before it. I built the surface in dense, competing fields of colour, letting blacks and pinks argue across the canvas until a figure surfaced from the noise. The blocky, stained-glass structure is deliberate: I wanted the composition to feel assembled from fragments, the way memory is. It is one of the larger works from this period, and one I returned to again and again before letting it go.