Artist Residency - Museum of Nepali Art

Sensitively composed, this body of work chant with fluid paint strokes and transcending layers that illuminate the divine bellowing, ghostly figures. A beam of divine retribution reveals the boundless, a dance between those enlightened and those abandoned. ‘These paintings are reflective of a narrative of what once was, setting alight the personal purging that empowered renewal. The blazing balance of the devastated and the devoted is unveiled through the dismay of the wounded. Their anguished echoes of whispers and prayers sway across the canvas only to conclude in an everlasting embrace.

‘Fall at your feet’ 2025,

Part of the Museum of Nepali Art collection.

For Joanna, this painting invites viewers into a space where inherited pain meets hope and renewal. The large figures appear to kneel at the top of a wound-like composition. They dissolve into the central, yet overpowered woman lying down where she soaks in the pool of uttering figures that are diffused below her. Charcoal ash is softly spread into the outlines of these ghostly figures of her memory and ancestral lineage, carrying the pervasive weight of abandonment. Though drifting towards the bottom, some reverse their course, dripping back into the centre, as though they are still leaking through. This disorientation unsettles perception, revealing the harsh truth of surrendering to pain that pours over, to the wounds both carried and inherited.

This painting physicalises the process of working through, and piecing together the intrexicable and entwined experiences of pain. Soft, warm yellow gently cradles the scene while the red, symbolising subjugation and preservation in buddhism, bleeds through, holding the tension between suffering and resilience.

‘Moving inside of you.’ 2025. Oil paint on canvas.

The body becomes both vessel and terrain where ancestral echoes move through layers of memory and surrender. Figures emerge and dissolve in this shifting composition, where ghostly outlines tether to the burning central form that holds both vulnerability and resilience. Shadows seep into the warmer planes, setting alight the personal purging of trauma and wounds, empowering renewal.

The painting moves between rupture and renewal, externalising the unravelling of intergenerational cycles. Tender red and umber pierce through, holding space for devastation and preservation.

‘Can you come with me?’ 2025. Oil paint on canvas.

Can you come with me? Unfolds as a plea for witness and companionship within the weight of intergenerational memory. The figures appear suspended between emergence and disappearance, their forms fading into one another, as though asking to be carried through the threshold of pain and into renewal. The central sun at the top becomes both guide and question, where bellowing flames turn vulnerable in its surrender yet reaching toward the possibility of shared endurance.

Soft, diffused tones are pierced by deeper shades that echo wounds and ruptures, while still holding space for tenderness. The work gestures to the fragility of asking another to step inside one’s grief, and the quiet strength that can be found when the call is met.