The Cycle of Life is an autobiographical triptych about becoming - about the way a woman moves through childhood, love, motherhood, loss, change and renewal while carrying within herself everything that came before.
At its centre stands the Tree of Life, rooted in memory, faith and inherited tradition. Its branches move outward into different stages of experience, linking past and future, vulnerability and resilience, belonging and transformation. The work draws on the visual language of sacred and medieval art, where every detail carries symbolic weight, yet its subject is deeply personal and contemporary: the inner journey of a woman learning who she is through the lives she has already lived.
The left panel holds the world of childhood - dreams, beginnings and the first sense of possibility. The central panel enters a more complex territory of identity, love and motherhood, where devotion and responsibility coexist with the need to preserve a self of one’s own. The right panel opens towards change: new horizons, uncertainty, release and the courage to continue.
Throughout the triptych, recurring symbols create a visual language of time and passage. The winding road becomes a life path; birds suggest freedom and longing; clocks mark the fragile movement of time; the sea opens towards what cannot yet be known. These elements do not illustrate a fixed story. They form a psychological landscape in which memory, desire, fear and hope exist together.
The work is shaped by a spiritual inheritance in which sacred imagery is not simply decorative, but a way of contemplating life, mortality and meaning. Echoes of the great European masters - Jan van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch and Rogier van der Weyden - are present not as quotation, but as a dialogue with a visual tradition in which the earthly and the spiritual remain inseparable.
The Cycle of Life is ultimately about continuity: the way one life contains many selves, and the way every ending carries the possibility of another beginning. It asks what we keep, what we release, and what remains within us as we move forward..