Don’t protect me from what I want. Let me find it, name it, and have the courage to follow it.

My practice explores the body as a place where desire, intimacy, and social norms meet. I work primarily in oil on canvas, from miniature paintings to almost body-sized works. The faceless body is central to my visual language. Bodies are cropped by the frame, fragmented, partially hidden, or dissolved by light. By leaving out the face, I interrupt the familiar relationship between looking and identifying. The body remains present without becoming fully available to the gaze.

At the centre of my work is a simple question: how do we recognise desire as our own? Desire is never entirely private. It is shaped by culture, economics, social expectations, and by what we learn to consider desirable, acceptable, shameful, or forbidden. I am interested in censorship not only as something imposed by institutions, but also as something that becomes internalised through shame, normativity, and inherited ideas about love and relationships.

This leads me to question the assumption that intimacy has to be organised around possession, exclusivity, or fixed identities. I am interested in relationships that allow space for autonomy, curiosity, consent, and freedom.

The opening line is a reframing of Jenny Holzer’s Protect Me from What I Want. Holzer points to the ways desire can be shaped and manipulated by power and the market. I take this question further by asking what happens when we try to recognise desire as something that belongs to us. What do we actually want, and what have we been taught to want? And once desire is recognised, how can it be lived through attention, consent, freedom, and care rather than possession?

For me, intimacy begins with attention. It means turning towards another person and allowing space for their otherness. It can begin with curiosity and pleasure rather than fear. This is where non-exclusive intimacy enters my practice. It is not a subject I illustrate, but one of the ways I question the structures through which relationships are usually understood.

Each series approaches these questions from a different angle. In Celebrating the Mundane (2020–2022), lockdown restrictions turned everyday domestic life into a space where pleasure had to be invented. In Body Poetry, intimacy unfolds between people rather than within a single body. Two bodies can suggest the possibility of another presence, and desire becomes something fluid rather than a fixed arrangement.

In Beach of Odesa and the ongoing project Ambient Citizenship / Laws of the Beach, the body enters a shared public space shaped by unwritten rules. The modern beach became a space of leisure and public bathing roughly two and a half centuries ago. People began to undress beside strangers and, for a limited time, suspend some of the ordinary codes of shame and privacy. The exposed body could exist in public without automatically becoming an object of threat or possession. The beach becomes a temporary social space where vulnerability, freedom, and tact coexist.

Colour functions in my work as an independent language rather than simply a way of expressing mood. I am particularly drawn to green as a colour of transition and instability. A sage-green ground can hold a scene of intimacy almost physically, creating a space between bodies rather than simply a background behind them.

My painterly references include Milton Avery, David Hockney, Édouard Vuillard, and Marlene Dumas. Conceptually, I return to Michel Foucault, Susan Sontag, Georges Bataille, and Byung-Chul Han. Across these different influences, I look at intimacy as something that is both personal and political, shaped by the ways we look at one another, understand vulnerability, and negotiate the right to desire.

Painting gives me a space to stay with these questions without resolving them. It allows me to look at bodies, relationships, and desire without turning them into fixed categories. I am interested in what becomes visible when people are allowed to exist outside the structures that usually define how intimacy should look.