This year’s paintings were created outdoors, as if with an ear pressed to the sounds of nature, between forest and sea. The works were painted for the exhibition “This Has Always Altered Me”, which took place at Artrovert Gallery in Tallinn.

The works created during this period are deeply inspired by my profound love for the North. It is from this love that my solo exhibition “Põhisoontes” (“In the Nordic Vein”) was born – a visual narrative of northern nature, quiet wisdom, and the hikes I took through Northern Finland and Northern Norway.

It was the year I began preparing for my first solo exhibition, which was also my first painting exhibition – “Hortus. Aed ja Ruum”. I began painting a garden – a garden that, for me, also symbolises a space, an inner space.

To view that garden from afar, to move from the tiniest details towards a broader vision – to paint boldly and expansively, without control, without fear of making mistakes. To reach a larger picture. To reach abstraction. To reach an inner space where secret gates appear, guiding you forward. These are hidden gates. To come to the realisation that the garden is within you – the place where everything begins to sprout, everything grows, and where all the fruits you long for can be harvested.