FLOW -Original Artwork

7 Jul

My artwork Flow will be exhibited at our local art gallery in Fishponds, Bristol. I'm excited to show my work in our lovely local community for the first time — and it's such a pleasure to exhibit alongside such a wonderful and talented artist at Circular Artspace on Fishponds Road.

This piece began on my yoga mat, not in the studio.

Meditation and yoga have been part of my daily life for years now — not as a wellness trend, but as an actual practice I return to every day. Stillness first. Then the breath work. Then a movement I come back to often: arms rising above the head on the inhale, ribcage opening, the whole body lifting for a moment before it settles back down on the exhale.

I've done that lift thousands of times, in meditation and in yoga. I never thought of it as anything other than breathing practise.

But at some point, mid-lift, I noticed the shape my arm was making. An arc. The same arc I kept finding myself drawn to on the canvas, over and over, without ever deciding to paint it deliberately.

That's when Flow became something more than a painting. It became a way of putting twenty-thirty minutes of sitting in silence, and the movement that follows it, onto a surface I could actually look at afterward.

I wanted the arc on the canvas to come from the same place the arc in my body comes from — not measured, not planned, not drawn with a ruler or a stencil. So I built a tool the way you'd build anything at home from what's lying around: a bent nail, fixed to the floor as the pivot point. A shoelace, tied to the nail, stretched out to the exact length of my own reach. A brush, tied to the other end.

Then I did what I do every morning, sitting quietly before I start anything. I breathed in, and I let my arm lift, and the brush followed — pinned by a nail, dragged across the canvas by the cord, moving at the pace of my own inhale. Exhale, and the brush came back down. Over and over. The arc that resulted isn't a shape I drew. It's a shape my breath drew, using my arm as the instrument and a shoelace as the memory of the distance.

Many weeks of returning to this canvas. Sitting with it the way I sit in meditation — no rush, no fixed outcome, just showing up and seeing what's there that day. Some sessions just one arc. Some days none at all.

Flow is a 100 × 120cm, acrylic and metallic pigment on canvas.

It's part of my Bark & Grain collection, and it's the piece that's taught me the most about how I actually want to work — not forcing a composition into existence, but building the conditions for it to arrive on its own, the same way meditation has taught me to let a thought arrive and pass rather than chase it.

Not forced. Found.

Flow is a large acrylic canvas artwork measuring 100× 120cm.

‘Flow’ is part of the selected works that is exhibited in Circular Artspace in Fishponds, Bristol from the 9th July until the 1st August 2026.