I am currently living at least one of the wishes I used to pray for and I want to pause and feel the magic of looking back to acknowledge how far I've come. I’ve been reflecting on the moments that shaped my studio practice in 2025; not the loud ones, but the quiet pivots, the gentle expansions, the subtle intuitions that gradually steered the work in a new direction.

This year felt like an invitation to slow down, to listen more intently, and to allow the paintings unfold in their natural rhythm. Some pieces surprised me, some challenged me, and a few remained close to my heart long after the last layer dried.

Selecting the top five feels like asking a mother about their favourite child, but I accepted the self-imposed challenge and managed to select a handful of works that marked my year. Each one carrying a story, a tension, or a pulse that still lingers, an internal rhythm, material memory, connection, and how we hold what’s beneath the surface into a broader landscape that holds us too.

The Event Recorder

The Event Recorder, 2024. Acrylic, charcoal and oil pastels on canvas. 160x140cm. Available from Hake House. 

I want to start this review at the end of the year in 2024 with The Event Recorder. In retrospect, this painting became a portal to what was to come next and this is why is such an important work.

This painting feels like the beginning of a story I didn’t know I would be telling this year. A few years ago, I wore a cardiac event recorder, one of those small medical devices that listen for irregularities the body can’t always name. What started as  a moment of vulnerability, returned to me asking to be painted

In the studio, and years later, the idea unfolded slowly. I wasn’t interested in the device itself, but in the sensation of being observed by something that only wakes up when something “unusual” happens. It made me think about all the quiet events we carry: emotional shifts, sudden realisations, subtle turning points, the ones that never make noise but leave a mark.

The Event Recorder became a way of mapping those internal pauses and ruptures. Layers of charcoal and pastel move like signals; blurred passages sit against sharper lines, like a record of moments that rise and fall in intensity. The painting holds that sense of listening inward, of noticing the things we usually rush past.

It feels like the work that opened this year for me, not because it is dramatic, but because it taught me something about the fragile, steady rhythm of being alive, present, and paying attention.

Rain, Pond, and Notes

Wyvern Hospital installation grew out of the belief that art can shift the emotional temperature of a space, especially one where people are vulnerable or waiting for answers. This project is deeply tied to social prescribing, emotional well-being, and the idea that the right colours, textures, and forms can quietly soothe the mind.

Rain, Pond, and Notes, 2025. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 120 x 180 cm

From this installation, I have selected Rain, Pond and Notes. There’s a particular kind of hush that rain brings. A moment that asks you to slow down and notice the small reflections on the surface of things. Rain, Pond and Notes grew from that hush. On first glance the palette leans into dramatic, almost gloomy passages, but close up the work reveals bright under-layers and small blooms that quietly insist on themselves. For me this painting became an exercise in gentle translation: how gloomy days can fold into days of hope, how layered marks can hold both sorrow and the possibility of change. It felt right to include this piece in the Wyvern Hospital installation. I wanted it to be a soft companion for people moving through difficult moments, a surface to rest on and perhaps find a small, unexpected warmth.

Installation at Wyvern Hospital in Terry Hills. 

Field Notes From The Bottom Of The Earth

This year, I worked on a collaborative field project led by artist Susie Dureau at Eramboo Artist Environment. I explored how we “read” the invisible using tools such as sound and imaging to capture signals below what our eyes typically see. That experience seeded a triptych titled Field Notes From The Bottom of the Earth.

I approached the land almost as a living body under examination, a place where marks, textures, colours and layered gestures record the ebb and flow of time and transformation. The second panel of this work was selected as a finalist in the 2025 Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Prize, which felt like a meaningful affirmation of this land-as-body conversation and how art can touch both ecological and emotional realities.

Field Notes From The Bottom Of The Earth _2, 2025. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 120 x 120 cm

My desire for 2026 is to present this work as it was initially conceived, a triptych that will support my ongoing inquiry into how the body and the land resonate with one another.

Traced Pulse and What Lies Within

From my solo exhibition, De Rerum Natura at Gallery Lane Cove, I have two picks. 

Traced Pulse sits at the centre of my practice because it holds two rhythms that shaped my year: the one inside my chest, and the one carried silently through life moments.

In this work, the pulse of a human heart meets the vertical memory of bark. One exists as a medical trace, an M-mode ultrasound line, the same fleeting flicker that often becomes a person’s very first image of life. The other comes from the natural imprint of a tree, rolled in pigment, pressed onto raw canvas, carrying its own quiet chronology. Print and projection, body and landscape, present and ancient; all converge as if they’ve been waiting for each other.

Traced Pulse, 2025.  Raw canvas, acrylic, charcoal, tree branch and M-mode ultrasound video projection. Dimensions variable

The work is about the way life leaves marks. How a heartbeat, once captured, continues to echo long after the moment has passed, how a tree grows in rings but also remembers in texture. How the materials we touch and the technologies we rely on both become archives of who we are and where we’ve been.

What matters to me here is the meeting point, that thin line where nature holds the body, and the body returns the gesture. Traced Pulse is part of an ongoing inquiry into the in-between spaces where my art lives: medical imaging overlapping with the organic world, the personal dissolving into the universal. In the spirit of De Rerum Natura, this work gestures toward continuity,  the way everything pulses if we are willing to look closely enough.

What Lies Within, 2025. Acrylic, oils and pastels on canvas. 153 x 183 cm.

The second artwork selected from this exhibition is What Lies Within. There’s a scaffold of order beneath it, but the surface is full of small deviations, micro-gestures, hesitations, slight misalignments that reveal my human hand. It mirrors how real pulses behave: never perfectly mechanical, always influenced by emotion, memory, breath.

Shared Rhythms

I closed the year with the launch of my first Capsule Collection, small restorative doses of colour and companions bridging what we observe and feel. From this collection, Shared Rhythms is a work rooted in the invisible ways we sync with one another and how emotional frequencies hum between people long before anything is spoken.
This piece grew from my fascination with the ‘in-between’ space: the part of the conversation where pause becomes connection, where silence is not emptiness but resonance. It’s an artwork about belonging without explanation, about leaning into the rhythms we co-create.

Shared Rhythms, 2025. Acrylic and oils on board. 62 x 47 cm. Framed in natural oak

As I look back on these works, I’m reminded that painting is always an act of presence, a way of touching the world with every gesture, layer, and decision. Thank you for sharing this year with me, for the conversations, the quiet support, and the curiosity you bring to the work.

If any of these pieces speak to you, I invite you to visit the links and explore them more closely. They each carry a small part of my year, and I hope they offer something meaningful to yours as well.

For any enquiries, you can email me at hello@marisabelgonzalez.com or  click here.