Through Her Hands

One of my earliest memories is connected to watching my mum draw.

I remember summer light in our family home, the quiet of the room, and the certainty of her hand moving across paper. She drew faces in profile, flowers, and portraits of musicians. She seemed completely absorbed in her own world then—calm, focused, present. Even as a child, I knew she carried doubts and contradictions within herself, but drawing seemed to calm her for a moment.

I loved watching her confidence as she created another beautiful thing.

 

My mum drawing at our family home.

 

I remember she showed me how to paint sunsets. Yellow passing into orange and red, then slowly into the blue and deep navy of the sky and water. We blended colours with our fingers so the transitions would remain soft, without visible outlines. We painted swans and ducks on water.

Creativity entered my life first through the hands rather than language.

My mum also kept notebooks filled with cuttings from newspapers and magazines, quotes, lyrics, photographs, and fragments of things she wanted to keep. Soon, I began collecting my own fragments too. Shells, reproductions of paintings, landscapes, faces, flowers, staircases, pieces of text. I rarely knew why I wanted to keep them. I only felt that they mattered somehow.

Looking back, I think I was already learning to pay attention to the things that attracted me and searching for the links between them.

 

Fragments, cuttings, and images carried forward through time.

 

At home, there was also a thick book about the history of art. I could not yet read, but I often took it down from the shelf just to look at the reproduction of The Tempest on the cover. I liked pretending I was reading it. I remember the smell of the old pages, older than me.

The painting disturbed me and attracted me at the same time.

I did not understand the story it was telling. A woman with a child sitting in strange surroundings. Another figure nearby. An unsettled sky. Water. Architecture in the distance. The silence of the scene felt stronger than the storm itself.

I think I already loved mystery then. I liked that I did not understand it.

Even now, I think paintings lose something when they are explained too quickly. What matters to me most is the feeling that remains afterwards. The quiet recognition of something difficult to name.

 

Girl with a Shell I, 2023 Charcoal and graphite on paper, Detail

 

Over time, I realised that many of my own works move around similar feelings: shelter, memory, silence, tenderness, presence.

In Lunula, the crescent became a kind of first shelter.

In Authentic Gaze, I was thinking about the quiet courage of simply being seen as you are, without performance.

In Echoes of Memory, my daughter holds a shell I bought as a child during a trip to the Baltic Sea with my brother and sister. My brother is gone now, but the shell remained.

 

Some objects remain long after the moments connected to them have passed.

 

I have always been drawn to shells. They carry something both fragile and protective. People say we hear the sea inside them, although in reality we hear the echoes of our present surroundings. I often think memory works in a similar way. We do not return to the past exactly as it was. We carry its echoes inside the life we are living now.

Recently, I have been thinking about the symbol of the door.

In some traditions, the door represents a threshold between worlds. A passage from one state into another.

I think certain doors in our lives are not physical at all.

Sometimes a person becomes a door.

Watching my mum draw opened something in me before I had words for it. Not only the desire to paint, but a way of being with images, silence, and attention. A way of trusting that meaning does not always arrive immediately.

 

She rarely waits for perfect conditions to begin.

 

Now, when I sit with my daughter and show her how colours dissolve into one another, I sometimes wonder whether she feels the same quiet fascination I once felt while watching my mum.

I am fascinated by her fearless attitude and enthusiasm. She rarely hesitates. She does not wait for perfect conditions to create. That still surprises me.

Perhaps certain ways of seeing are passed on quietly through small shared moments.

 

Watching my mum and daughter paint together felt strangely familiar.

 

 

A page from a childhood diary.
My mother filled the first page with drawings and a quote from Seneca that stayed with me long after the notebook itself disappeared.

"We do not learn for school, but for life.

To my beloved daughter – Mum."