Space for Two

A pink-and-white cloud fills the canvas, and in the middle of it two people are sitting. They are holding each other, backs to you, dark figures the size of a fingernail.

“Space for Two”, 100 × 80 cm, many layers, mixed media, gloss, finished in aluminium and bronze.

The texture is porous, full of small craters and pinpricks: the surface boiled and set in that state. The pink runs from saturated at the centre to white at the edges.

The pair are not sitting in space but inside the pink. I gave them nothing to sit on. There is no planet under them and no ground; they are holding on to each other, and that is enough.

The gloss gathers light in patches, and by evening the pink warms up.

Art for a bedroom first of all. Over a bed, over a chest of drawers, in a child's room.

The pink here is not sweet, there is grey and dust in it, so it lives with a grown-up interior: bouclé, marble, pale wood.

You only see the figures up close. From across the room this is a cloud, and half the people who look at it never notice the two.