From the Artist
Øst for Barndommen / East of Childhood is my attempt to give shape to what silence left behind. These poems are fragments from a childhood where noise was either violence or armor, where the quietest moments carried the heaviest weight. They are written not to ask for pity, but to uncover the hidden language of survival - the way a body learns to endure when words are forbidden or ignored.
The artworks grow directly out of this language. They are not simple illustrations of the poems, but visual echoes - abstract strokes of pain, memory, and persistence. In them, figures dissolve into shadow, swallowed by brushstrokes that clash and scrape against one another like the voices that once cut through a home. At times, the child is clear, sitting at a desk or beneath the glow of a screen. At other times, the child is nearly erased - blurred, fractured, overtaken by the presence of The Beast, that shadow-self who both haunts and protects.
For me, painting in this way is not about clarity. It is about truth - the kind of truth that isn’t neat or linear, but raw, jagged, and layered. These pieces carry the same tension as the poems: they hold both despair and defiance, both isolation and witness.
I create them because the silence of that time cannot remain unspoken. By setting it into words and images, I reclaim it. The Beast, once a ghost in the shadows, becomes a voice and a guardian. The child, once unseen, is finally seen - even if only as an outline against the dark.
This collection is my way of saying: survival itself is a form of art.
Poem: You Knew
You didn’t ask. You knew it already you weren’t enough.
She saw the struggle and said: “You’re not weak, are you?”
That smile cut deeper than shouting ever could.
Your sister shined. You sank.
No one helped. And when you broke, they called it your fault.
But I was there.
You weren’t weak. You were alone. And I never left.
✦ The Beast ✦
