About this Project
Rooted Alive is an ongoing project that began in the summer of 2025 in Japan. During that time I became intensely aware of the trees around me. Their foliage was denser and more abundant than the trees I had known in London. The sheer mass of leaves felt saturated with vitality. It was not decorative. It felt active and insistent.
I began working with monotype as a way to respond directly to that encounter. Monotype method allows only a single primary transfer. Each print is the result of pressure between paint and surface. It cannot be reproduced in exactly the same way. That singularity felt aligned with the nature of life itself. A moment that appears, shifts, and cannot be repeated.
The early works were rooted in trees and dense clusters of leaves. Over time the focus expanded to flowers growing between rocks, bushes standing against the sea, and at times the forest as an enveloping field. The subject changed, but the inquiry remained consistent.
These monotypes does not aim to depict plants literally. Instead it investigates how vitality occupies space. Through pressure, layering, and gesture, each monotype records contact and transformation. The works function as fragments that belong nowhere specific. They capture the pulse of growth, resistance, and persistence. It is about life as force. Life as expansion. Life as continuous change.
After returning to London, I began reinterpreting the monotypes I had produced in Japan. Although abstract, they carried a concentrated energy. Many of them felt like condensed fragments of summer. The heat and humidity of Japan were far more extreme than in London. That intensity seemed embedded in the prints. They appeared saturated, almost juicy, as if holding compressed life within their surfaces.
I became less interested in their imagery and more focused on the force inside them. The question shifted from what they depicted to what they contained. What I wanted to express was not plants or landscape, but life itself. Vitality. The vividness of a living moment. The condition that keeps things alive through continuous change.
Through this reflection I arrived at a simple realisation. Change is not an attribute of life. It is its foundation. When something stops changing, it is no longer alive. A flower that blooms endlessly is artificial. Light that never fades is not sunlight but a lamp. Life exists through alteration, transition, and instability.
This understanding marked a shift. I began focusing on the conditions of living systems rather than their forms. The paintings no longer derived from observation of trees or forests. They emerged from an attempt to construct a visual field capable of holding movement, tension, and transformation.
The Korean philosophical concept 정중동 ( Jung - Joong - Dong ) describes this condition precisely. It refers to movement within stillness and stillness within movement. The surface may appear stable, yet energy continues to circulate beneath it.
The Movement in Stillness series is the result of this shift. These paintings attempt to capture life not as an image, but as a state of ongoing change held momentarily within the canvas.