A blue curaçao cocktail / a wink from another realm, 2025.

This is an ode to the municipal pool in Aldeia de Marim in south of Portugal in 1997. The first taste of freedom, with all the other teenagers, so many languages, blue curaçao and first hangovers, Marlboros from the vending machines, the endless sitting around and chatting about nothing and everything, the adventures ahead. My first dream of my dad after he died was of him with a blue curaçao cocktail, a ‘fantasma’ that you’d set alight and it was strong, disgusting and delicious. He winked at me and then disappeared. He’s been a purposeful dreamwalker ever since, often on beaches, with cocktails. These paintings are an ode to togetherness, in all the realms, to memory, to walking the tightrope, to carrying forward those we have loved and so painfully lost and to being open enough to still keep making bonds with new people, even if the risk of loss remains the same. High stakes, big, beautiful gains, devastating possibilities of loss.

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120 cm wide x 175 cm high, acrylic on canvas, embroidered text.