Iris (2026)

Memory Garden – Iris is part of an ongoing body of work in which I reconstruct childhood memory through botanical image, color, and layered material process. The work draws on recollections of the landscape of my childhood — in particular a marsh-like garden space filled with irises, water, grasses, and overgrown vegetation — a place that persists in memory less as a fixed image than as an atmosphere. In this piece, the iris becomes both subject and threshold. Suspended between an amber upper field and a cooler blue lower register, the image suggests a shifting relationship between air and water, surface and depth, presence and reflection. The composition does not describe a landscape directly; instead, it evokes the instability of remembrance, where fragments of place return in altered form. A cyanotype print on silk is embedded beneath multiple translucent layers of acrylic, each gradually built and hand-polished into a reflective surface. Through this process, the image remains partially submerged within the painting, appearing and receding according to light, angle, and distance. The polished surface functions not only as finish, but as structure: it creates a space in which memory is held in suspension, never fully fixed and never entirely lost. Like the broader Memory Garden series, this work approaches memory as something materially reconstructed rather than passively recalled. The iris is preserved not as a botanical record, but as an afterimage — intimate, atmospheric, and shaped by time. Through the fusion of cyanotype, silk, and luminous acrylic depth, the work transforms personal recollection into a space of visual resonance, where image, reflection, and emotional memory coexist.