A daily record of arrival. Diurnal began as a journal during my first months living in Salford after moving from Kent. Each mark, each collaged fragment, each burst of yellow and green holds something from that time: the disorientation of a new city, the strange intimacy of routine forming in unfamiliar streets, the Salford City Council label embedded in the surface like a found memory. The canvas accumulates rather than resolves. There is no single moment here, only the layering of many ordinary days, pressed together until they become something else entirely. Mixed media on canvas

Layers of writing, in Nepali, in English, pressed beneath paint until the words dissolve into colour. This piece began as a journal and became something else in the making: an act of expression that didn't need to be read to be understood. The magenta and cerulean move against each other like two languages that don't quite translate, held together by the white that bleeds through both. Healing, here, is not resolution. It is the willingness to let things sit alongside each other, grief and brightness, the known and the becoming. Acrylic on canvas

Made with both hands. This piece began as an exercise in bilateral movement, one of the first things I encountered in expressive arts therapy, a practice of letting the body lead before the mind can interrupt. The figure stands with her back to us, turned inward, arms folded around herself. Written into the background, woven through the marks, are words, fragments of internal monologue, the kind we rarely say aloud. The way the writing lives inside and around the body rather than beside it was intentional: this is where those words actually live. This work is meant to connote self-compassion. Self-compassion is not softness or self-indulgence, it is the quiet, ongoing work of offering yourself the same kindness you would give someone you love. Mixed media on paper

Made with both hands moving at once. This portrait came out of my first encounter with expressive painting, a practice of bilateral movement, working with what the body knows rather than what the mind plans. The marks are intentional and instinctive at the same time. The face that emerged held everything I was sitting with that month. The green and burnt orange, the raw charcoal lines, the gestural colour laid across and through the form, none of it was decided in advance. It arrived. This is what expressive painting offers: not a finished image, but a record of what was present. Mixed media on paper

A portrait painted from imagination. Blue distance was made during a period of long distance, an attempt to hold someone present and make sense of it. The figure is my partner, rendered from memory and feeling. The cool blue-grey of the skin against the warm, burning orange of the background holds that particular tension: the closeness of someone and the distance between you at the same time. Acrylic on canvas