Eternal Flames

I started making enamels in the university studio of Oleksandr Boroday, a Ukrainian enamelist. I learned the technique there, grinding pigment, layering it on copper, firing each layer separately, sometimes four or five times before a piece is done. It's slow and physical in a way painting isn't.

Fired enamel doesn't age. At 800 to 900 degrees the glass fuses to the metal, and once it cools, the colour is fixed for good. In a thousand years it will look the same as it does today.

What pulled me in was the opposite. You put the piece in the kiln and you don't fully control what comes out. The heat can shift a colour, pull a line, take something somewhere I didn't plan, and I ended up thinking of it as a kind of game I play with the fire. I'd open the kiln not knowing exactly what I'd see, and that not knowing became the part I looked forward to most.

It changed how I paint too. Working without a sketch, leaving room for the unexpected, that habit started in front of a kiln, long before it showed up on canvas.

These pieces are from 2015 to 2018. Later I went into a postgraduate programme and kept studying enamel, focusing on Ukrainian hot enamel in monumental art, and I've written about it since.