The Participant continues the exploration of figures suspended in ambiguous psychological and physical spaces, where interior states echo against material surfaces.

Here, the curtain with oversized polka dots feels theatrical, almost like a backdrop. Yet the figure doesn’t “perform”; instead, she sits passively, gazing away, caught between being subject and spectator. Extending the theme of liminality, where moments are neither action nor stillness, but a charged pause.

The person is stripped of detail with her hair cropped short, face turned away, and body painted in flat dark clothing. Here individuality thus recedes, and she becomes more of a silhouette, like a placeholder for interiority, memory, or absence, rather than a portrait of someone specific.

The curtain dominates the composition, its dots almost swallowing the space. The tension between the flat graphic pattern and the draped folds mirrors the tension in my other works in this series between surface and depth, material and spirit, body and environment.

The figure’s gaze upward suggests longing or apprehension, but with the face obscured, the exact emotion is withheld. This ambiguity keeps the viewer hovering in the same unsettled space as the subject. Adding to the ambiguity is the strange shift in color and shadow along the floor and between the chair legs, more like an abstract painting than a representation of a person sitting on a stage. I believe the psychological dimension of this painting is powerful because it is ungraspable.