I. Between Sweetness and Discomfort
— Rethinking Illustration

My practice began with illustration, a world where lines behaved and colors obeyed. It was a language of precision, where every shape could be read, and every feeling neatly contained within a frame. For a long time, I believed that clarity was a kind of kindness — that to be understood was the purpose of the image. Yet over time, that safety began to feel like confinement. What I once thought of as tenderness began to harden into performance.

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I started to wonder what happens when an image refuses to behave — when sweetness turns slightly wrong, when the gaze lingers too long, when the cute becomes uncanny. In Sianne Ngai’s theory of “the aesthetic of cuteness,” she describes cuteness as both an invitation and a form of control, a power relation disguised as affection (Ngai, 2012). That observation mirrored my own discomfort: the more delicate my images became, the more I felt trapped inside them.

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Leaving illustration was not a rejection but an unravelling. I began to question what illustration could become if it stopped serving clarity. I stepped away from paper, into matter — fabric, lace, wood, resin, wax. Each material carried a small resistance, a refusal to stay still. They bruised, burned, and crumbled, teaching me that images too could fail beautifully. Through printmaking and laser cutting, I learned to trust error as a form of truth. Every failed impression, every scorched edge, became a quiet map of how control collapses.

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This turning point echoed Freud’s notion of the uncanny — the moment when the familiar reveals something deeply strange within itself (Freud, 1919). In my work, that strangeness began to emerge through the domestic: a chair wrapped in lace, a wooden horse covered in fabric, objects trembling between comfort and unease. What I once drew as symbols of safety began to shift into thresholds — spaces where affection and fear coexist.

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In hindsight, those experiments were less about changing medium than about unlearning obedience. The smooth line of illustration gave way to the trembling edge of reality. I was no longer trying to draw well; I was trying to see differently. The work stopped asking to be liked, and began to breathe, to fail, to reveal.

It was here, in the delicate collapse between sweetness and discomfort, that my practice first began to live.


 

References

Freud, S. (1919) The Uncanny. In: Strachey, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.

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Ngai, S. (2012) Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

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