During a walk through the Botanic Gardens in autumn, while the world was focused on the grandiosity of golden maples, I found myself drawn to the Japanese anemones shivering in the shadows. They were small, modest, and fragile. My initial intent was to give them the “main character” - to pull them out of the shade and give them the scale they deserved.

However, in the process of painting, a shift occurred. As the forms became larger and the lines more distorted, the anemones began to shed their original identity, morphing into the likeness of a lotus. This unintended transmutation became a meditation on my own identity. It suggests that our cultural 'DNA' — the symbols we inherit like the lotus — is so deeply rooted that it colours how we perceive and recreate the world around us. By blending the sinuous, high-energy lines of Australian modernism with these echoes of Indochine flora, the painting becomes a site of collision between the environment I inhabit and the heritage I carry.