"No Name" was made during a period when relocation had unsettled my sense of continuity with myself. I was living inside a prolonged state of psychological transition in which familiar ways of thinking and reacting no longer felt stable, while whatever was replacing them had not yet become recognisable. The works came out of that unstable interval rather than from a desire to describe it retrospectively.

At the time, withdrawal felt almost necessary. I wanted distance from other people, from external demands, and sometimes from my own emotional intensity, yet the wish to disappear was accompanied by an equally strong need to remain visible and distinct. This contradiction gradually entered the portraits themselves. Faces are enclosed by masks, spikes, collars and protective surfaces, but they are never fully concealed. The eyes remain exposed, preserving contact even when the rest of the figure appears defended, restricted or transformed.

The protective forms in these paintings are not simply armour. They sit somewhere between defence, self construction and performance. They can hide vulnerability, but they also create a more deliberate and heightened image of the person wearing them. Protection becomes a way of controlling how one is seen at precisely the moment when the internal sense of self is becoming difficult to hold onto.

I called the series *No Name* because for a long time I genuinely could not name it. Eventually that absence began to feel inseparable from the works themselves. They were made at a point when identity felt provisional and language arrived later than experience. Rather than resolving that condition, the series stays inside it, in the space where the previous self has already become unfamiliar and the next one has not yet taken a fixed form.