“A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother,” writes Maggie Nelson. BODY is inspired by Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a letter written to a mother who cannot read the language it is written in. The series is a visual poem in English, dedicated to my mother. It comes from ten years of witnessing cancer and chemotherapy, and from the slow change in care that illness asks of a mother and her son.

Each painting shows an empty swimming pool seen in perspective, with words set on a hand-drawn grid along the far wall. The pool is a container, a closed sea open to everyone, and it recalls the first immersion, life in utero. Lacan wrote that we are born into a bath of language that exists before us. The pool holds words the way the sea holds light.

Each letter is built one square at a time, a pixel rebuilt by hand. Below a certain size the square can no longer be drawn, and that is where the human begins. Then colour moves across the surface. Sometimes it buries the words, sometimes they take the colour of the ground and disappear into it. Up close the grid comes apart, from a distance it holds. I am inspired by Agnes Martin’s vision, and drawing my straight lines is a meditative process. Disappearance and mimicry run through the work: the words take the colour of the ground.