Dear Encounterer,

From the darkness of our minds - yours and mine - deceitful tentacles have risen. They are here to protect The Entrance, lurking in the shadows, twisting our perception, blurring the edges, whispering half-truths until we forget there was ever a doorway at all. Born from shame, stitched from other people’s judgement and fears.

They have the nature of a constrictor - if you get too close, the sneaky tendrils will wrap around your chest, squeezing and pulling down, gentle enough to keep you breathing, heavy enough to hold you from descending.

The Darkness is not bad, nor is it good. It is simply the veil, which is there to hide something.

Have you been paying attention? Look up, there is no shadow without light.

How well do you know yourself? Oh yes, you know yourself very well. But in case you have forgotten, turn around, face The Shadow. Right there, in the abyss that has the shape of your eyes, you will find it. Somewhere there, a small ache pulses - a quiet tug on the edge of your memory.

Don't worry about the tentacles. They lose their grip once they are noticed. After all, they are your own creation.

Past the darkness, you will find your Swan and Light. Bright light within you.

I wanted to expand the sources I draw inspiration from and the mediums I work with. This shift led to a new approach which allowed me to draw on both memory and present experiences and create my own dreamlike metaphors.

A main inspiration came from a walk with my daughter, when we stumbled upon a hidden pond behind a wall of shrubs. That moment - the act of passing through a threshold and entering a secret place - became a central image for me.

This resulted in a new project that I called Taking the Swan Out of the Bag, a project in which the swan symbolises repressed dreams, desires and unacknowledged parts of the psyche, while the bag serves as a metaphor for the subconscious that contains them.

The act of extracting the swan is mirroring the process of individuation - a journey toward integration and wholeness.

My daughter, though not visually represented, acts as a symbolic bridge between past and present, between my own childhood and motherhood. Perhaps she is the representation of a Swan. This experience with the pond evolved into a poem called Swan Ache, followed by series of monoprints and paintings.

It is almost always this quite unexpected feeling of familiar. The kind of feeling as ‘not knowing what it is straight away’, a resonance, an internal response that might not be fully articulated immediately, subtle activation of the subconscious. I can describe it as invisible string that hooks to the viewers psyche, to one of their swans, and remains there for a long time after they leave.