"Transforming to Red" Painting

Fire is a destructive force. I use it to create some of my most fragile works. These are not portraits of people.They are portraits of interior states — the ones that don't have names yet. The weight that sits behind composed eyes. The bruised inner life of someone who has learned to appear fine. The turmoil that never quite surfaces. I work in oil, in fumage — flame held close to paper until the face appears in the soot, not drawn but found — and in the kind of line that confesses rather than constructs. I was born in South Africa. I live in France. My work lives in private collections across four continents, with people who recognised something in it they couldn't find language for the before they saw it. If you recognise something in this work, that recognition is the point.— Lioda Conrad