2024 - ongoing
Death of a Hero began as a personal response to grief. I returned to drawing after a long break—creating abstract, emotionally dense watercolors that helped me process loss, confusion, and fear. These works were improvised, tense, and full of internal pressure. At the time, I didn’t think of them as a series. I was simply trying to survive.
Then something changed. The images, once compressed and inward, began to open. White space appeared—not as background, but as an active part of the composition. The forms stopped behaving like wounds or blocked landscapes seen through a window. They began to grow. What started as documentation of internal collapse turned into a visual recovery. I realized I was no longer just expressing pain—I was watching it shift.
That was the first transformation.
The second came with the central question:
Who is the hero that dies here?
This wasn’t about a historical figure or a personal idol. It was about the figure of the hero itself—the myth of the lone, exceptional individual who acts on the world from above or outside. That model, in life and in art, no longer felt relevant. I began to question authorship, authority, and the need to control the outcome of a work. I wanted to move toward a more open, interdependent process. That’s when I turned to biology.
In the current phase of the series, I work with living organisms—fungi, bacteria, agar, spirulina—alongside acrylic paint and plastic. These materials aren’t symbolic. They act. The fungi spread through the surface. The bacteria break down the acrylic over time. One part grows. The other dissolves. The artwork continues after I step away.
At first, I called this a collaboration with nature. But the more I worked, the more the term “nature” unraveled. If I’m part of nature, and acrylic is derived from oil, and oil from ancient life, then where is the border? What exactly am I collaborating with—and what illusion am I still feeding when I call it “natural”?
This series isn’t about using nature.
It’s about confronting the idea that we were ever separate from it.
And if we aren’t, then what does it mean to give up control?
What does it mean to create when you’re not the center?
Sometimes I seal the canvases with thin film.
It started as a way to preserve humidity, but I quickly saw what it actually was: a boundary. A membrane between the viewer and the living. Between curiosity and fear. Between touching and watching.
So I leave the film in place.
I let the fear become part of the piece.
Death of a Hero is not one work. It’s an ongoing transition.
From internal healing to external process.
From authorship to co-existence.
From drawing the image to letting it live—and sometimes disappear.