Bottled Up

Exhibited at Gallery Unbound in 2025, Bottled Up explores how we hold back what we feel, through my father's carafe as an object of still life.

This carafe sat in the fridge door of my childhood home, holding my dad's wine. It's now in my fridge, filled with water. Dad was a bottled-up kind of guy. He didn't reveal much of his inner life. When conversation at the dinner table went below the surface, he'd go off and do the dishes. He only became more direct in the evenings, after a few glasses of wine, when his defences relaxed.

As my own kids got older, I came to understand that we can never truly know the entirety of someone, even those closest to us. And yet we frequently see them, and ourselves, in the ordinary objects they leave behind.

These paintings are a homage to my dad, a comment on how we bottle things up as a culture, and an invitation to slow down. There's a stillness and clarity captured in the carafe and the glass. If we quiet down enough and let the emotions happen, we can find real depth in the ordinary.