"I'm looking for patterns of friction and repair, images that look scratched, scuffed, wind-swept."

I call myself a mixed media poet – whether I’m painting, writing, trying to figure out the shape of a political problem or listening to people explain what happened. It’s all part of the same act of attention. Recently, my paintings have been changing. Much of my earlier work revolved around layered and soft-edged rectangles, deep colours shaped by the gentle erosion of a soft sponge. Over time the shapes acquired gaps, as if their solidity had been breached. Other paintings are like cave drawings on soft rock, as if I’ve gone inward in search of shelter.

I want my paintings to have the slightly awkward look of something that’s clearly hand-made and iterative, and always evolving in response to its own process.

I often see landscapes when I paint, the kind others might consider wastelands: mountains, deserts, mud walls. Rock faces shaped by erosion and the slow motion of tectonic plates. I see cityscapes too, the kinds that others might consider wastelands, with their layers of destruction and repair and everywhere, still, the buoyancy of life. Sometimes I see strange and happy creatures, weird vehicles like tumbleweeds that have come alive. Explosions of colour and line that could be either exuberant or terrifying, or both. A mix of emotions, always.

Martine van Bijlert is a mixed media artist and poet who grew up in Iran, now lives in the Netherlands and, in between, lived and worked in Afghanistan. She is the author of ‘Peace, peace they say’, a poetry collection about peace that kept turning to war.