A commission rooted in place

When House of Sunday approached me, the brief was simple and open: create a series that felt cohesive with the space and in harmony with it, made from local pigments and natural botanicals from Bali, where the restaurant is based.

For me, that meant starting not with colour but with material. Rather than bringing a palette to the space, I wanted the palette to come from the island itself.

An open studio inside the restaurant

What made this series different was where it was made. The whole series was painted inside House of Sunday itself. The downstairs of the restaurant was cleared out and became my studio for around two to three weeks, open to the street.

Passers-by could watch the work being made, and many came in to ask questions, talk about the materials and see the paintings change from one day to the next. Painting in public like this was new for me. It turned a private process into a shared one, and the conversations became part of the work.

Secang wood, gambier and betel nut

The series is built from three materials with long histories in Balinese and wider Indonesian life. Secang wood, also known as sappanwood, has been used across Southeast Asia for generations as a red dye and in traditional drinks and remedies. Gambier, drawn from the leaves of the Uncaria gambir plant, is used in dyeing and tanning and in the ritual of betel chewing. Betel nut carries its own layered meanings of hospitality, ceremony and exchange.

Across these traditions, colour is never only decorative. It is bound up with offering, protection and renewal, and with the rhythms of daily life. Working with these materials meant working with that history, not just with pigment.

Every colour in the series was made by hand. The raw materials were boiled, ground, dried and suspended, then mixed into paint and applied in thin, light washes, layer after layer.

When the paint wouldn't behave

Not everything went to plan. Because of the nature of the pigment, it would not fully mix with the binder. The paint stayed grainy and uneven, and for a while I struggled to accept it. It felt like the material was working against me.

But as I kept working and trying to understand the medium, I found that this textured paint could be scraped back. I could apply colour and then pull it away, exposing the layers underneath. What began as a problem became a new tool. Scraping added another level of layering and complexity to the surfaces, and gave me a different way of shaping and controlling the paintings.

A palette that came from the materials

The palette emerged from the materials themselves: warm oranges, earth reds and deep organic browns that echo soil, bark and weathered surfaces, while sitting quietly within the visual language of House of Sunday.

Handmade paints are never fully predictable. Each batch shifts slightly, and every mark holds a trace of how it was made. Between the washes and the scraping, the surfaces were built slowly and intuitively until they felt settled.

Under The Sun

At the heart of the series is Under The Sun, a polyptych of five panels, each 60 × 75cm, stretching three metres together. Overlapping arcs carry from one panel to the next, so the work can be read as five separate paintings or as one continuous horizon.

The works in the space

Once finished, the paintings were placed around the restaurant to accent the space and settle into it. Two of the single paintings hang downstairs, in the room where they were made. Upstairs, Under The Sun stretches across the focus wall at the back, the five panels reading as one long horizon over the room.

The series asks for a slower way of looking, and a more intuitive connection to material, place and time. It is the kind of work I love making most: shaped by where it will live, and made from the ground it comes from.

You can see every painting from the series in the Sunday Series gallery. If you would like a series made from the materials of your own place, whether a home, restaurant or hotel, get in touch about a commission.