Some details slip past. Others lodge themselves permanently. What stays with me is rarely a whole face or event – it's a microsecond of sensation: a smell, a taste, a sound, pulled out of a day that's otherwise forgotten.

Smell can hit the body before experience becomes language. I carry two landscapes of scent at once – the cherries and wasps of childhood, and the country I now call home, with melting snow and gingerbread at Christmas. Two sets of smells that never fully replace each other.

What I notice is that the details that stick hardest tend to come from a particular kind of second – where pleasure tips toward danger, before it's clear which way it will go. Fireworks are most beautiful in the second before they become confetti. A cherry is sweet right up until the wasp lands on the same skin. In that instant, pleasure, danger, and the body's alertness exist at once, before either has won.

Cherries and Wasps investigates these seconds. I don't paint a story. I paint the place where pleasure and danger share the same surface, as it was before thought had time to intervene.