KMVH’s practice began after a series of traumas in which language fractured and the 'old self' was stripped away. The first space that made it possible to breathe again was the ocean, not because it offered healing, but because it offered recognition. In the presence of the ocean, the feelings of loss, emptiness, and dissolution were not resolved but reflected. That reflection and recognition was the beginning of what this practice investigates.

Central to this investigation is Sigmund Freud's concept of the Oceanic Feeling: a sensation of eternity, and of being one with the external world as a whole. The Oceanic Feeling is encountered not as an escape but as a form of recognition and return to the pre-language self, and functions as a liminal space: a threshold between destruction and belonging, between violence and return. Freud dismissed this experience as a regressive illusion and the residue of an infantile form of consciousness. KMVH’s practice proposes a counter-reading/experience to Freud’s self-referential clinical framework. For KMVH, the dissolution of self-boundaries before the ocean does not signify regression; rather, it becomes a philosophical mode of undoing, a necessary annihilation of the fabricated self, built as a defence after trauma has fractured the self's core. The Oceanic Feeling was not regressing - it was a return to the pre-constructed self.

The works engage critically with the tradition of the sublime and diverge from Kant's formulation, which demands that the subject abandon sensibility in favour of transcendent reason. Following Friedrich Schiller's opposing understanding, the sublime is not a division of faculties but a product of their intensification: what Schiller called 'energetic beauty', in which the soul is disturbed and thereby occasioned to produce harmony. Dissolution and belonging coexist within what Schiller called the 'aesthetic condition', not against it. The ocean does not ask the self to transcend the body. It creates a space in which sensuous and rational powers operate without constraint.

Working with charcoal and acrylic on canvas and wood, the process is both meditative and intensely physical. Charcoal resists obedience; it stains the hand and erases the carefully calculated plan. Each work begins with structure and ends in absolute dissolution, enacting what Walter Benjamin might describe as a rupture in the cycle of mythic justification: a threshold between control and surrender. Drawing on Derrida's concept of différance, each work operates through repetition and deferral; the same sea reappears, yet never the same as before. The ocean evokes an Oceanic Feeling that the ‘self’ experiences, which cannot be possessed, only approached. Meaning becomes visible through what cannot be fixed.

These works do not seek to resolve the tension between selfhood and dissolution. They ask what remains when the self is stripped of its ‘rational’ order and reflected in the turbulent movement of water. They ask whether the loss of self-boundary constitutes a crisis or a threshold, and whether, within that fragility, the possibility of recognition can emerge. It is not peace that the ocean offers. It is the recognition that, in this violent world, the self can dissolve and still exist.