I draw my reactions to the world – to a person I pass on the street, a dress I can’t forget, the texture of a fabric under my fingers. These things stay with me as feelings first: joy, pressure, curiosity, pain, wonder. My drawings are how I translate those inner stories onto paper. I don’t want to illustrate a scene; I want to put on paper the state I was in when something moved me.

The main language I use is the stylised body of a ballerina. Over years of studying the human figure, I learned it so well that I felt free to simplify it, to turn it into a sign, a pattern, a structure I can bend in any direction I need. I don’t use faces or hands – they never felt necessary. The contour of the head and body is enough for me to make a ballerina scream, hurt, jump for joy or stand proud and arrogant. When a male figure appears, it’s rare and always there to support the woman, to highlight her delicacy and her strength, never to dominate the scene.

Line and pattern are how I build the feeling of “too much”: endlessness, tension, crowding, pressure, but also endless curiosity and joy. With line I construct, layer, and accumulate. With patches of colour I break that infinity, I cut it, interrupt it, sometimes as if I’m taking the air out of the drawing. Black and white is my natural territory – sharp, pure, direct. Colour I love too, but only once I have altered it, mixed it, made it mine; I almost never use it straight from the bottle.

Technically, I am in love with paper and nib. Paper feels alive under my hand. Cotton and cotton-based papers answer back to the nib – sometimes they resist, sometimes they let it glide. The nib doesn’t just draw, it scratches, engraves, leaves a tactile trace. You can feel it with your fingers, almost like reading Braille. On canvas this relationship is colder for me; on paper, the dialogue between surface and tool is intense and intimate.

What I want to say with my art is, in the end, my reaction to beauty, to impact, to hurt, to anger, to tenderness and sadness. But what fascinates me most is that my reaction can become something completely different in the eyes of another person. My “beauty” can feel excessive or even ugly, my enthusiasm can feel like pressure, my heaviness can become someone else’s sadness. That is why I love to ask viewers first: “What do you feel? What do you see here?” In their answers I discover new layers in my own works. The drawing begins with me, but it never ends with me.