A first-person account of grief, money, freedom, creative work and the projects that shaped my year as an artist.
The year looked smaller online
A few months after the death of someone I loved, I entered my first real existential crisis. I was about to turn 30 and wondered whether the work mattered, especially when the internet showed me teenagers with multi-million-dollar businesses, property portfolios and high-paying jobs.
When I mapped the year instead of comparing it, I saw that I did not want to give my youth to a business, manage several properties or trade freedom for a corporate salary. I want control of my time and room to explore. This is the record I wrote for myself and for other creatives who feel lost.
Experiments that became real work
I started EXPERIMENT Art Residency with kora, planning it online, inviting eight artists we barely knew to live and work together in Vietnam, learning the hard way and turning it into a programme running in Berlin and returning in 2026.
My cofounder Danaja and I received eight months of funding through the Grace Accelerator for CounterCult. I also joined a fully funded Rural Hackers residency in Anceu, rural Galicia, for two months, making paintings, installations and textile pieces from found objects.
Painting, tattooing and a room
Pink.Dot Berlin invited me to hold my first solo exhibition, with a stipend. I began tattooing and connected motifs from oil paintings to street art and tattoo flash, first testing that full-circle performance at the solo show.
Eva Garland remembered my work from our Artel Fest group show and invited me to paint part of the Beach Stage for WHOLE Festival. I camped and created for days. I also began learning full-stack development so CounterCult could grow without waiting indefinitely for a developer.
THE FLOOR and the numbers
I moved into a ground-floor space with a small garden and started THE FLOOR as a Berlin project space, inspired by Gertrude Stein’s salon nights and Warhol’s Factory. The first salon night had happened, and an exhibition was next.
Across the year I painted five large-scale murals, completed six private commissions, made 19 tattoos and took part in two exhibitions. I planned a 2026 trip to South Africa for art and tech.
What the year paid
After taxes, all the work brought in about 16k in 2025. I had worried that it was not enough, but it gave me a genuinely good quality of life, freedom and a way to get by because I live simply. With budgets cut for the next year, I expected to take design freelance work alongside the art.
The number is part of the archive because an artist’s life is also made of rent, funding, commissions and choices about time. It does not cancel the paintings, murals, tattoos, residencies or rooms. It explains the conditions that let them exist.
Originally published on Substack