CABINET OF SMALL WORLDS

The Cabinet of Small Worlds are paintings that hold memories, colour, feeling, and secrets. The name comes from the old cabinets of curiosities – but where those gathered objects, mine gather meaning: every colour, every leaf, the labels on the bottles, the titles of the books, and smaller paintings tucked inside, each placed for a reason. An entire world in one frame.

There are four. Invictus is the still, composed one – colour at its most saturated, set against a deep black ground that makes every hue sing. Green Cabinet is the living one – nature climbing over the shelves, everything in bloom, a heart breathing again.

Green Lush and After Rain are the way in. Green Lush is pure overgrowth: the shelves still somewhere underneath, grown over until green is all there is – an evergreen kept beside you, a place to walk into and stand among the leaves. After Rain is the hideaway, the mushroom shelf opened up, sunlight coming through the green – somewhere small and fresh to climb inside and get lost. Made as a pair, both are worlds to live inside.

Nothing in a cabinet is only itself. Other paintings of mine appear within them – sometimes as a small framed picture, sometimes as an object resting on a shelf – and the same motifs cross between them: a serene woman, the bees, a black cat that runs through everything, the dropped dot that begins in Prima Materia. Some secrets are easy to find; others, like the references grown over under the leaves of Green Lush, are almost impossible. It is all connected, the way it is in my head.

I still find something new in them every day, and I painted them. That is what I want them to be: an entire book of stories on one wall, a game you end up playing with the people you love – do you see that? did you find this? – and a reason to slow down and stay curious, the way you were as a child, when finding a small thing felt like finding treasure.

Each cabinet is a whole world, kept on paper. Every one is available as a fine art print.