I'm Anna

In my early years, art wasn't just an activity. It was a way I connected with others and felt that I belonged.

🎨 My friends and I swapped anime-inspired art when we were young.

🖼️ I gifted paintings to friends and family. Some are still hanging proudly on their walls!

👩‍🎨 I participated in 'art sessions' with friends, where creating art together often won over doing school projects.

When I moved to the UK at 17, I carried that creativity across continents. I didn’t have my old friends anymore. I was homesick, lonely, and tried to find my footing in an unfamiliar country and culture. I was desperate for authentic connection, and I struggled. My sketchbooks from that time were full of isolation and sadness, but it helped me feel anchored while everything else felt foreign. I held on to that early promise: just keep drawing.

But life doesn’t always give you space to create. Sometimes, it demands you survive instead. At 21, my mum became seriously ill with kidney failure. She had to return to the Philippines to get a kidney transplant. My mum was the only adult I could rely on at the time and she had to leave. It wasn't her fault at all, but suddenly, it was just me and my younger sister here in the UK. We had no extended family. No safety net. 

I was forced to become the adult. I worked, paid all the bills and took on the debts. I told my sister to focus on school and not worry about money. We both did what we needed to do to survive. This experience turned me into a different person. I found a stronger side of me, but at the expense of sacrificing other parts of my being. During that time, creativity felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. I carried this new person with me for a very long time.

That said, I never completely stopped. Over the years, I found myself coming back to art in waves. There were brief periods where I found myself reconnecting to my younger self. It was never consistent, but the desire to be creative was always there. The logical part of my brain kept saying I need security. Art is not a priority, it's a luxury.

Then, a few months ago, came my own diagnosis: stage IV kidney failure. I’d known it was coming since I inherited this disease from my mum. I was told I had two years before needing dialysis or a transplant. This brought back all the memories of what happened in the past. The fear of what will happen to my future and I was suddenly face-to-face with the looming weight of my own mortality. It felt like everything stopped. I am anxious about what will happen and equally grieving about the things I hadn’t yet done and may not be able to do. 

And then I asked myself the hard question:
If I was going to die soon, what would I want to do?

The answer was clear:
I want to create. I want to connect. I want to live with meaning.

Through that reckoning, I returned to art—but this time with purpose. I attended a course that allowed me to inquire who I really was underneath everything I’d carried. And I found the words I’d been circling for years:

My purpose is to heal relationships and create authentic connections.

That purpose now runs through everything I make. My art isn’t just about aesthetics or style, it’s about people. At the heart of it is everybody. My family and friends, the connections I've made in life, the stranger walking down the street, every single person. It's about the invisible golden thread that connects us to all living beings.

I don’t know exactly what the future holds for my health and I'm still in the process of accepting this. What I do know is that I’m here now. I’m creating work that nourishes me. I’m building spaces where others can feel a little less alone. And I’m shaping a body of work that quietly says:
You belong. You matter.

If you’ve made it this far — thank you for walking this journey with me. We’re all tangled in this together, in this invisible golden thread of connection. Anna - April 2025