Horizontal Tears explores the private architecture of grief, insomnia, and emotional restraint. Created in response to a late-night poem of the same name, the work transforms intimate emotional experience into a layered abstract landscape of looping forms, translucent washes, and restless movement.

Through the use of acrylic, ink, brusho pigments, and marker, overlapping lines drift and collide across the canvas like unresolved thoughts or silent conversations with the self. Soft, muted tones contrast with darker gestural marks, reflecting the tension between vulnerability and concealment - between what is felt internally and what remains unseen by others.

The piece centres around the idea of “horizontal tears”: the tears shed in solitude, absorbed into a pillow rather than witnessed publicly. Embedded fragments of poetry become partially obscured within the composition, mirroring the hidden nature of private sorrow and the quiet exhaustion of fighting internal battles alone.

Rather than depicting grief directly, Horizontal Tears maps the emotional turbulence of sleeplessness, memory, and introspection. The layered surface suggests accumulation - thoughts, emotions, and experiences lingering beneath one another, never fully erased. The result is a work that feels both intimate and unresolved, inviting viewers to navigate their own emotional associations within the chaos and stillness of the piece.