Power Trip began as an exploration of power within sexual intimacy; how control, surrender, desire, and choice move between people through the body. Drawing from autobiographical experiences, the project initially focused on a specific relationship, using painting to examine the tension between vulnerability and agency.

As the work developed, it became less about documenting a relationship and more about documenting the process of thinking about one. Influenced by my experiences of ADHD, the project reflects the dopamine-driven cycles of fixation, repetition, and return that shape how I process emotionally significant experiences. Rather than moving directly from experience to finished painting, the work expands outward through cyanotypes, watercolours, drawings, photographs, and repeated studies. These pieces function as a visual map of thought, recording the continual revisiting, reworking, and reframing of the same subjects.

Digital intervention became increasingly important to the project. The relationship at its centre was largely mediated through phones, dating applications, social media, photographs, and messaging platforms, making digital space inseparable from lived experience. Screenshots, dating app prompts, song lyrics, photographs, fragments of conversation, and emotionally significant objects appear throughout the work as traces of attachment and memory. Rather than treating digital material as secondary documentation, the project acknowledges it as a primary site where contemporary intimacy is formed, performed, archived, and revisited. The accumulation of these digital and physical fragments reflects both the experience of online dating and the way emotionally significant relationships continue to exist through endless acts of looking, scrolling, saving, and returning.

The finished oil paintings act as moments of resolution within this larger network of images. In contrast, the surrounding studies reveal the instability of memory, desire, and perception, showing how meaning shifts through repetition. Power Trip therefore became not only an investigation into power dynamics within intimacy, but also an exploration of how attraction, obsession, and emotional intensity are processed through image-making in an increasingly digital world.