Inner Gardens explores the complex emotional landscapes women cultivate within themselves; private worlds shaped by care, duty, longing, restraint, beauty, rage and survival.

These works were created while thinking deeply about the pull between who we are internally and who we are required to be externally. The invisible emotional labour of womanhood. The ways motherhood, relationships and expectation can both deepen and fragment the self. Beneath the surface of daily life exists another landscape entirely: wild, contradictory, sensual, grieving, tender, rebellious and alive.

The title Inner Gardens speaks not to serenity, but to cultivation. To the ongoing act of tending to an inner life while the outside world continues to demand from us. These paintings hold moments of suppression and moments of release, traces of joy, instinct, exhaustion, fantasy and becoming. They explore the parts of ourselves that refuse to disappear completely.

Nature has long acted as a metaphorical language within my practice: growth, decay, softness, overgrowth, seasonal change. But these works are ultimately about psychological terrain. The hidden ecosystems women create internally in order to survive, endure and remain connected to themselves.

Rather than offering resolution, Inner Gardens sits inside complexity. It asks what happens when women begin listening again to the truer parts of themselves, the parts that exist underneath performance, expectation and care-taking.