Created during the early stages of my university practice, Layers of Time marked one of my first deeper explorations into fragmentation, temporality, and the idea of distorting what exists within the frame. The work began through a series of photographic experiments — combining portraiture, staged ritualistic installations, and symbolic objects — before being reconstructed into a layered psychological space where time, memory, and perception begin to collapse into one another.

At the centre of the work stands a partially turned male figure, painted with heightened realism against an otherwise fractured environment. The figure appears consumed by shadow, carrying a dark dripping weight that slowly spreads across the body like an accumulation of emotional residue gathered over time. While the torso and profile remain carefully rendered, the face disappears beyond the edge of the canvas itself — suggesting a loss of identity, concealment, or perhaps the inability to fully confront oneself.

Surrounding the figure is an unstable landscape of fragmented symbolism pulled from a second photographic installation centred around candle ritual and ceremonial arrangement. Candles appear throughout the composition in varying forms, sizes, and colours; however, rather than being painted realistically, they are reduced into simplified blocks of colour and shadow. Their original identities become partially lost — transformed into abstract emotional markers rather than physical objects. Wax spills, scattered structures, ritualistic forms, goblets, drifting architectural fragments, and ghost-like presences overlap within the same atmospheric space, refusing clear narrative or chronology.

The background itself becomes liminal — suspended somewhere between memory, ritual, dream, and emotional dissociation. A muted purple haze holds the composition together whilst simultaneously allowing forms to emerge and disappear unpredictably. A pale figure-like presence lingers within the upper left corner, undefined and almost spectral, suggesting the persistence of memory and the quiet haunting nature of past experiences that continue existing beneath conscious thought.

Central to the work is the idea that mental health rarely exists linearly. Past, present, and imagined future often overlap simultaneously; moments of memory, anxiety, hope, exhaustion, and becoming existing all at once within the same psychological space. Through the contrast between realism and abstraction, the piece mirrors the difficulty of articulating internal emotional states — where some experiences feel painfully vivid whilst others dissolve into distortion, fragmentation, or silence.

Layers of Time explores the tension between visibility and concealment, structure and emotional collapse, physical presence and psychological distance. The viewer is invited not simply to observe the work, but to mentally navigate through it — piecing together fragmented traces of memory, symbolism, ritual, and identity whilst questioning what remains real, remembered, or emotionally constructed.