From Self-Expression to Dialogue

I was recently invited to give a talk at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, as part of the thematic course The Street. It gave me a welcome moment to pause and reflect a bit on where I started, and where I find myself now.

When I first started painting graffiti, it was all about putting myself out there. Making a mark. Saying I’m here! I wasn’t really thinking about how people would see it—or what they’d take from it.

But over time, that changed. I started wondering how things were being read. What kind of reaction they might spark. What someone else might feel or think when they came across it.

These days, that kind of awareness feels like a natural part of how I work—in how I approach my art and the book publishing projects I’ve been developing over the past few years. Maybe it comes from studying architecture, where you’re constantly thinking about how things communicate, how they’re experienced, and what kind of message they carry. It’s not just about the object itself, but what happens around it—how it fits, how it speaks, how people relate to it.

That shift has stayed with me. I still care about expression, but now I’m just as interested in dialogue—in the space between the work and the person encountering it.