I used to sit on my bedroom windowsill with my bag of marbles.
One foot hooked over the radiator beneath the window. Outside, the glass would be cold. Inside, I was warm and safe, holding a marble up to the light and turning it slowly between my fingers.
The colours inside never seemed fixed. They drifted and folded around one another. Light passed through some parts and caught on others. I could spend ages looking into them.
I was completely absorbed.
At some point, I stopped looking at marbles.
They disappeared, along with countless other things that had once seemed important. They quietly slipped out of view as other things took their place.
Years passed.
Then decades.
Life filled up.
Many years later, after I’d begun painting seriously, I found myself working on a study of marbles.
I spent hours looking into them, studying the light and following the ribbons of colour suspended inside the glass.
As I painted, the experience began to feel strangely familiar.
The windowsill.
The radiator beneath my foot.
The winter light.
The feeling of turning a marble between my fingers.
It was all there.
The memory had arrived because I was looking at the marbles in exactly the same way I had as a child.
I hadn’t thought about that moment in more than forty years, yet I could feel it with extraordinary clarity. The cold glass. The warmth of the radiator. The feeling of being completely absorbed by something that seemed endlessly fascinating.
What struck me was that the feeling didn’t disappear when the memory surfaced.
Day after day, as I worked on the paintings, I found myself returning to exactly the same absorbed state.
The girl on the windowsill wasn’t somebody I used to be.
She was me.
At the time, I didn’t think too deeply about it. I simply loved painting the marbles.
What surprised me was the response from other people.
Many shared memories of their own and described the same feeling of being unexpectedly reconnected with a part of themselves they hadn’t visited for years.
It took me much longer to understand what was really drawing me to those paintings.
The marbles themselves weren’t the subject.
What interested me was the connection they created.
The joy of unexpectedly finding a part of yourself you didn’t realise you were missing.
Certain objects seem capable of collapsing time. They reconnect us with earlier versions of ourselves so completely that the distance between then and now briefly disappears.
In that moment, we aren’t observing the past.
We are experiencing a version of ourselves that has been there all along.
That realisation eventually became the foundation of a body of work I now call Past & Still.
People often describe these paintings as nostalgic, and I understand why, but that has never felt quite right to me.
What interests me is recognition. The sudden awareness that the person we were has not vanished beneath the accumulated years.
We carry those earlier versions of ourselves with us. Like Russian dolls, each one remains inside the next. Most of the time we hardly notice they are there.
Then something brings them suddenly into view.
That is why I continue to paint these objects.
Not because they are old, but because they reveal something that is easy to overlook.
Beneath our responsibilities and the sheer busyness of life, we remain connected to the same curious person we have always been.
Every now and then, something brings that connection sharply into focus.
For a moment, the decades collapse, and we recognise ourselves again
