A Woman's Secret Heart
2021

'A Woman's Secret Heart' ' began in 2020 and was completed in 2021. The series comprised of nine paintings makes visible the innate desire for motherhood present in every woman. Anca reflects on the abstruse connection between the desire of giving birth and of being born, the invisible connection between the woman and her unconceived child. She first created a list of loving words imagining how a woman would address her unborn child and then she painted the physical environment of the womb, a liquid metamorphosis of the inside of the uterus and the baby, between imagination and reality, between figurative and abstract. The appearance of fluidity was obtained without pouring technics or using fluid colours. She painted on a course paper creating transitions between colours in a traditional way, with the intention of obtaining laboriously a result that would appear effortless as a reflection of what the process of becoming a mother means.

Present absence
‘I am angular, I am shaped like a sphere. I am incandescent, I am dim. I am muted, I am expanded. I have forgotten my face or my deviation from my ideal self. I turned red, I turned into a flame and I became heart and womb. I have sunk to the depths of my being, leaving no shadow, no burnt traces and no wisps of smoke to be kept in my nostrils. No sounds rattle along my thoughts. I begin to draw a figure in the flow of my being, the contour of a new beginning, a new life. Dots running into themselves and into dashed lines sketching ambiguous silhouettes and finally heading into the uninterrupted contour of a new persona. Should this be the beginning of the story? Yet beginning implies an ending. Should I become the last ripple of a wave, the wave that dies away while inspiring the next one with the desire to rise over the world? Had I been born knowing that in the same stream of life one death follows another, I might have been awake and aware of every movement away from my desires. We change bringing in new tides of perceptions, following new dreams. Yesterday I enjoyed the absence of a baby, today I long for its presence. The present is rolling up in the midst of the past and is laying down the future like a new carpet. I shall turn my body into a den, a warm shelter for my child. The eyes will see, when they are shut, inside my body and beyond. Can one desire fall like a blanket of night uncovering in the morning, when the down creeps in and the sun is glancing, a new personality or another probable self that takes over? Am I bringing a new life into the world through a baby or am I birthing another me? As I gaze out onto the world I am unable to pass by the ripple of my desire. The desire; the aspiration to manifest into form a transcendental realm. The realm of thought has no body or shape and it appears absent to the eyes. That realm, where we can learn about our lost origins, impinges upon us to constantly seek out to reconstruct our beginnings in the search for the ideal self. Presence is the original state. I can see the world the moment I open my eyes I assume that the presence came first self-reflected by my consciousness. The depth of my desire reveals itself in the silence of the present absence. I shall use love as the power of reinforcing insight. I say to my unborn child: ‘’I shall give birth to you from a state of grace, not as a captive of my desires. Your absence calls for a new beginning. I shall regrow my body with your presence. We will speak a silent language and in the absence of the outer sounds, our hearts will turn eternal. You will ask what the infinite is and I will tell you about what the eyes cannot see. You will ask what is behind the clouds and you will know one way in which the infinite is looking back to you. You will ask why the water moves in ripples at the touch of your hand... and why it leaves marks upon your skin... and you will learn there is no separation but one consciousness speaking in many voices.’
Notes on ‘A Woman's Secret Heart’/ 2021