What does a memory look like after it’s passed through the mind a hundred times? Babs Bleeker doesn’t paint what she has seen, but how it comes back: reassembled, vivid, and out of order. Not as full scenes, but as fragments: clouds drifting by, a treetop in soft light, a flicker of blossom. The brain doesn’t replay reality; it rebuilds it from scattered traces: layered, sensory, and associative.

Her work begins in the pause: the threshold between perception and memory, between what was there and what stayed. Each painting starts just before drifting off, as attention fades into feeling. A colour, a shift in light, something that suddenly appears can trigger a feeling half-felt but strangely familiar.