Tender Ruins, 2025

Tender Ruins is a series of watercolour and ink drawings tracing the quiet collapse of a relationship—and the deeper unraveling it unearthed. Figures and heads emerge in fragile contours, their edges blurred, their features dissolving, as if memory itself is fading. The medium—fluid, bleeding, delicate—mirrors the emotional state: grief wrapped in gentleness, pain softened by time.

These are not just portraits of a love ending, but of the past resurfacing. Childhood traumas, long buried, rise like smoke, triggered by intimacy’s withdrawal. The series captures that haunting overlap—where the end of one bond reawakens the first heartbreaks. Ghostly faces with empty smiles, faceless lone bodies, heads heavy with unspoken histories.

Two drawings—one of lovers entangled, the other of a woman swimming—are outlined in blue pencil, their forms tethered to the page. These searching lines speak to impermanence and distance, as if the figures are trying to stay afloat, trying to hold on before dissolving into the water or each other.

Tender Ruins is a meditation on how we carry our earliest wounds into our deepest connections, and how, in breaking, we begin to understand what we’ve always held. The drawings are remnants—of a love lost, of a self revealed, of a truth finally felt.