My scientific life and my artistic life may appear to belong to different worlds, but I increasingly recognise that they share a way of seeing.

Science trained me to look at systems — not only at individual elements, but at what happens between them. A cell does not exist independently of its environment. It receives signals, responds, changes and becomes part of something larger.

I sometimes think about my drawings and paintings through the language of embryology. An embryo begins with one cell, then two, then many. The cells multiply, differentiate and organise. What begins as a small number of apparently simple units gradually becomes populated, interconnected and interdependent.

Something similar often happens when I work. I may begin with one or two forms without knowing what the finished composition will become. Another appears beside them, then another. Shapes repeat but change. Lines establish boundaries or connections. Empty territories become inhabited. Gradually, relationships develop between the different elements until the surface begins to behave as a whole.

I am not trying to paint cells or embryos. What seems to have travelled from science into my work is the fascination with emergence: how complexity can arise from relatively simple beginnings, and how individual elements acquire another meaning once they become part of a system.

This is perhaps also why I rarely feel that I am simply filling a surface. I am watching something develop. At a certain point, the composition begins to impose its own logic. A new form has consequences for the forms around it. Balance shifts. Something needs to connect, separate, expand or disappear.

Painting allows me to explore this without having to explain the system or prove anything about it. Structure can coexist with intuition, colour, humour and ambiguity. A form may suggest a cell, an organism, an eye, a landscape — or nothing identifiable at all.

What interests me is the moment when a collection of separate forms ceases to feel like a collection and becomes something more: a living, interdependent whole.