New Art! “Flourishing Graft”

Flourishing Graft is a large abstract artwork created from recycled painted papers. The work depicts a fruit tree grafted to bear both lemons and oranges, its complementary colours alive with energy, tension, and harmony. Its trunk is centred like a traditional family tree motif, and overlapping circles suggest both fruit and foliage, and also the layered relational and social worlds that shape our sense of family and belonging. It imagines family and society as a grafted tree: rooted in connection, flourishing through difference.

Flourishing Graft (2025). Painted recycled papers on stretched canvas. 100 × 100cm

Grafting is both the story of my life and a metaphor for family itself. My marriage, our son’s transracial adoption, our migration, even a kidney transplant I received from my brother - each was a graft. Each asked for vulnerability, courage, patience, and hope. Each held both loss and the chance of new life.

So many of us know the pain of feeling different in our own family: the pressure to conform, or the rifts that open across generations and values. How do we stay close without having to think or be the same?

The grafted tree offers one answer: difference and connection can live together. Grafting never asks the branch to stop being what it is. A lemon grafted onto orange rootstock stays lemon. It carries its own fruit, yet flourishes through a new root system.

I worked with recycled brown packaging papers that already carried traces of paint - some intentional, others accidental. These came from my experimental work, the table coverings in my studio, brush- cleaning scraps, and colour- mixing tests. I added new layers of paint to bring the palette into harmony, then cut and tore the papers to build the artwork. The making became its own form of grafting: joining fragments of creative past to give them renewed life, meaning, and belonging within the artwork.

The process of cutting, layering, and reassembling paper for this artwork became a meditation on the care, flexibility, courage, and patience it takes to build thriving relationships. Strong contrasts of hue and saturation reminded me that differences can be uncomfortable, even feel impossible to harmonise - but they can also bring out the best in each colour and reveal unexpected beauty.

This vision matters far beyond family. In a world fractured by division and extremism, grafting imagines another way. Flourishing Graft is ultimately a vision of living, growing families and societies that sustain us all and allow each of us to bear our unique fruits.