Some surfaces begin with cement — heavy, resistant, already hardening before I have decided anything. Into that I pour, layer, and scrape: acrylic, oil stick, gel, spray paint. Each material either fights the one beneath it or surrenders to it. The work is built through that friction — and through nothing else.

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I came to painting in my grandmother's studio in Portugal. She was the first person who showed me that making something with your hands could be a form of thinking, a form of surviving. When she died, I stopped. Not gradually — completely. I didn't go near it for years. When I came back, what returned wasn't the same practice. It was rawer, more physical, stripped of any interest in refinement for its own sake.

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These paintings are records of internal states that resist language: anxiety, intensity, the specific pressure of feeling that has no clean exit. The layering and scraping are not formal decisions. They are how I process. Each work is built up and torn back, buried and exposed, until something that feels true finally settles. I don't know in advance what that will be. I only know it when the painting stops asking for more.

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At a metre square or larger, these works are meant to be stood inside of — close enough that the texture registers before any image does, close enough that the surface becomes an environment rather than an object. They carry weight in both senses: physical and otherwise. They are built to hold something that doesn't go away.

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I am not interested in work that explains itself. I am interested in work that the body understands first — the way tension lives in muscle before the mind finds a name for it.

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Julia