Open for a surprise II
2025.
Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: L20cm xW15cm
The sun touches the back of my neck, a place I have long neglected. Its warmth feels almost foreign, as though it is awakening a part of me I had forgotten.
Yet even as I rise into this light, I carry remnants of my old form. The skin still clings, dark green fading into purple, bruised and brittle. It dries, it cracks, it dies.
I find myself apologising for still identifying with this death for still feeling tethered to what has already fallen away.
There is shame in holding on, in tracing the outlines of what no longer serves me, but there is also tenderness. To shed is not instantaneous; it is a slow unraveling, a process of loosening the grip of what once defined me.
This piece is about that liminal space: the moment when the old body is still visible, still haunting, even as the new one begins to emerge. It is about the ache of letting go, the strange beauty of decay, and the way light insists on finding us, even in the places we have neglected.
In painting this, I wanted to honour the complexity of transformation not as a clean break, but as a layered process where death and life coexist, where the bruise becomes both wound and bloom.
Esther Akello 