Drawing Pencils, pen on a dairy page 14 x 13 cm

“Someone once swore to me that the grass was much greener elsewhere.” This drawing takes its title from a line in As Told by Ginger, a cartoon that shaped my childhood emotional landscape. The lyric carries a bittersweet tension, the longing to grow up and the ache of feeling slightly out of place, hemes that permeate much of my work.

I often explore nostalgia, teenagehood, and fragments of pop culture as emotional anchors. These references are not decorative; they function like memory triggers, pulling forward the feelings of awkwardness, yearning, and tenderness that accompany early adolescence. Through them, I revisit the emotional textures of a time when everything seemed both fragile and intense.

The drawing is made on a page from a thrifted diary, a material I return to constantly. As a stationery lover, I’m drawn to the intimacy of used paper: its faint lines, its slight yellowing, the ghost of someone else’s handwriting or calendar. These pages carry an invisible history, and working on them allows past lives and present emotions to overlap. Each sheet becomes a small archive of girlhood, time, and the quiet rituals of writing.

In this piece, the lyric becomes a portal: a reminder of the universal desire to be elsewhere, to become someone else, to believe that another version of life is waiting just out of reach. By placing this sentiment on a salvaged diary page, the drawing traces the delicate line between who we were, who we hoped to be, and the stories we tell ourselves along the way.