In February 2025, I participated in Of Love & Other Devotions, a collaborative group exhibition organised by CLBHUIS and Pink Poodle Society at The Hoxton Amsterdam. Bringing together 53 artists, the exhibition approached love as a multitude of forms, relationships and devotions .From desire and intimacy to familial attachment, generosity and the relationship we have with ourselves.

I contributed The Shunga of Janus, a painting that became my exploration of love as both union and separation.

The work brings together two ancient visual languages. Shunga, the erotic print tradition of Edo-period Japan, provides the physical intimacy: bodies intertwined, exposed to one another and momentarily occupying the same space. Janus, the Roman god of thresholds and transitions, introduces another direction. His two faces look simultaneously towards what is coming and what has passed.

In the painting, both figures carry the face of Janus. Their bodies meet, but their gazes move elsewhere. They inhabit the same moment while remaining suspended in different times. One perhaps looking towards memory, the other towards different futures.

Within Of Love & Other Devotions, I was drawn to this ambiguity. The exhibition asked what love can look like when approached from different directions; The Shunga of Janus became my answer to that question. A depiction of love not as resolution, but as the strange coexistence of closeness and distance, presence and absence, two people touching while still belonging, unchangeably, to themselves.