I Trap You

I Trap you is a series of illustrations on topic of love. They are an illustrated meditation based on a poem of the same name by Kae Tempest, and a visual exploration and expansion of meaning and interpretations of love.

I meditate on what it means to love and how I love, how the connections between people form and deepen in different ways. I interpret the poem in many possible ways, questioning my own expectations and experience of expectations in love, be it romantic, platonic, familial, or general love for the world. I explore the feelings of freedom and entrapment that build through our expectations, each human relationship being an experiment in love in a completely new way. I explore the combination of feelings that build our different notions of different kinds of love – attraction, curiosity, safety, excitement, respect, acceptance.

The figural illustrations are meant to be a symbol of human experience. Simplified compositions leave space for individual experience to complement them into a story, unique to each viewer. The illustrations bring a sense of calm, as if to ask the observer to sit down and think for themselves about the place they imagined love should have in their life, and about their experience of it: is it limiting them or is it freeing? Is it fulfilling or lacking?