As a child in the 90s, visiting my grandparents in the south of Spain, we collected pebbles on the beach and painted them with nail varnish, decorating the plant pots on the balcony with them.
As an adolescent in the 00s, I made rune stones; I painted beach pebbles with norse symbols whose meanings I never managed to decipher.
In the 2010s I realised my work is process led; I create instinctually, and meanings surface in retrospect. A form of divination, not so much predicting as reading my subconscious.
On a residency in the north of Spain in 2021, I shared stories about my teenage runes with a fellow resident, who some days later told me he found a rune on the beach - when he handed it to me I saw that it was a pebble painted with nail varnish.
So I bought some nail varnish, we collected some pebbles, and painted our own runes, created our own hieroglyphs, intuitively reading into them like I’d never managed in my teens.
In July 2022 I left London, saying I was leaving on a journey to find home, whatever, wherever or whoever that meant.
Back in the north of Spain, I started painting shells instead of pebbles. After eating scallops at a chiringuito one afternoon I asked to keep the shells.
Later I found a huge jar of abandoned shells in the residency I was living in.
I loved how the varnish pooled and dripped playfully in their crevices, feminine and aquatic;
I learnt that the word for shell in Spanish is used to mean vagina.
I lived nomadically for the following years, between residencies and exchanges, never far from the beach.
My mobile-studio consisted of beach-finds and nail varnish - materials surprisingly easy to source in the most remote of places.
I invited others to paint with me, we made runes together and I would gift them mine.
At some point it dawned on me that it was a meditation on ‘home’, after having left my own.
What are shells, if not nomadic homes, built from the calcareous excretions of their fleshy inhabitants?
Painting shells whilst searching for home. Painting others’ homes whilst thinking about my own. Waiting for home to find me.
But what is home? I keep asking.
Can you tell me?
I’ll provide the shells and the paint and you can tell me.
2021 - present