Seated woman with her hand raised by Studio Pronk.

A woman is seated with nothing beneath her and holds one arm straight up, so high that her hand disappears at the top edge of the sculpture. Behind her head hangs a vermilion disc like a halo; to the right rises a wine-red arch; to the left, two narrow strips curve upwards. Across her lap lies a large black shape that cuts her body in two. Her head is small, her thighs are enormous, and she has no face. What she conveys lies in her posture.

This is the first work in *Lijf*, a series about the body in motion, constructed from a handful of large, flat shapes. I work in the tradition of Matisse’s paper cut-outs and Fernand Léger’s rounded, heavy figures: form comes first; the body is what those forms together create.

The atmosphere is both triumphant and relaxed; it’s as if someone has just achieved something and is taking a moment to sit down.

There are no outline strokes in this work at all; colour lies against colour, as in a screen print. I construct the image digitally using AI and then run it through a colour-processing routine I wrote myself, in which every pixel is set to a fixed palette of six shades. As a result, all twelve works in the series share exactly the same colours.

Thanks to the large, calm areas of colour, this work is visible from a distance and looks striking above a sofa or in a long corridor.