Where the Bougainvillea Waits

Some places stay with us long after we have left them.

Not necessarily because anything extraordinary happened there, but because we remember the smallest things — the colour of an old door, sunlight falling across the steps, plants spilling out of their pots, flowers climbing a roof as though nobody ever told them where to stop.

Where the Bougainvillea Waits is my little ode to those places.

A quiet home sits behind an abundance of green and pink, its weathered doorway almost hidden beneath everything that has continued to grow around it. There is no person in the painting, and yet it somehow feels inhabited — as though someone has only just stepped inside.

For me, the work is about the strange way a place can hold memory. How sometimes all it takes is one doorway, one familiar flower, or one patch of afternoon light to make us feel that we have returned somewhere we know.

Perhaps home is not always a place we live in.

Sometimes it is simply a place we still remember.