Notes from a Tabletop

Some weeks before I was rushed into emergency surgery, I walked into the washing room and found a dozen dead flies scattered across the floor. I never figured out how they got in or why they had chosen that place to fall, but their presence lingered in me. A small omen, though I didn’t name it that way at the time.
Fast forward: in hospital, a scan revealed a gallbladder infection. The surgeons drained what they called “black gall,” toxic, infected matter that had to be removed. In that moment, it struck me as an alchemical body process—the dark bile of melancholy, long described in ancient medicine and alchemy, was quite literally inside me. It had to be extracted, transformed.
Not long after, in the same washing room, I found a cricket. Where flies speak of decay, endings, and stagnant matter, the cricket carries a different resonance: listening, alertness, renewal, even good luck. A small but striking shift in the symbolic atmosphere.
This language of signs was also present in my studio. On the tabletop I’d been painting—an old IKEA side table, Bloomsbury-inspired but meant for my own experiments—two figures had appeared as if uninvited: a crow and a salamander. I hadn’t planned them; they emerged as I sponged on my first layers.
The crow is a messenger, a threshold guide, a seer who stands between endings and beginnings. The salamander—born from fire, regenerating from what would destroy others—was inspired by a brooch my mother once wore. Both arrived before the crisis, before I knew what was about to unfold in my body. Art anticipating the message of the flesh.
When I returned to the table, I knew they had to stay. The crow, the salamander, and even the black gall were speaking to one another, telling me something about transformation and survival. About being both witness and alchemist to my own experience.
What began as a decorative surface now feels like an alchemical process report. The IKEA table has become a site of transmutation—part Bloomsbury homage, part personal emblem. Its surface holds not just paint but the record of a passage: through decay, through fire, toward renewal.

Only thing left to do is add the alchemical symbols for the 4 elements on the table legs. The table is an old white IKEA side table, top is 55 x 55 cm, height is 45 cm.