Stories: Behind Closed Doors Collection

27 February 2026

Behind Closed Doors launches today on Foundation, the second collection in my STORIES series that explores what happens behind the closed doors of houses we pass every day, on the street, in our neighbourhoods. Through 35 cubist artworks with brief narratives, the collection explores the hidden realities within ordinary homes. 35 brief glimpses into the beautiful and devastating truths we live with behind the closed doors of our contemporary lives.

Behind Closed Doors makes visible what neighbours never see: a woman practices lies about bruises before waving cheerfully at her neighbour. A man in aged care decides to stop taking medication. A retired teacher grows marijuana after his prescription is cut. A mother stands motionless in chaos, overwhelmed and drowning. A couple dances without music through dementia, muscle memory preserving what words cannot.

The Form

Each visual narrative combines a cubist house exterior with a short 30-word story. This pairing of house exteriors with intimate interior stories mirrors how we can never truly know what happens behind the closed doors of the people we live beside. Just as cubism fractures single perspectives into multiple viewpoints, these stories fragment the assumed narratives of suburban normalcy.

The 30-word constraint creates a compression that mirrors our glimpse of other lives. A light left on, a sound through walls, an expression caught before the smile returns. The brevity forces both writer and reader to hear what remains unsaid, that our deepest truths often live silent behind a closed door.

The Range

Spanning an emotional and experiential spectrum of private life, the collection opens with concealed grief and quiet ritual (a family portrait before the diagnosis, spare keys left for emergencies that never come), builds through mounting anxieties and secrets (rehearsed difficult conversations, a secret miscarriage, a missing child's bedroom unchanged for years), touches moments of lightness and connection (a couple dances without music through dementia, a secret anniversary song practiced silently at 2 AM), then descends through deeper grief and isolation (partners not speaking for days, bruises practiced into acceptable explanations, a widow ironing her husband's shirts) before ending with sustained loss (a professional identity lost to immigration, obsessive lock-checking years after a home invasion ends).

While some stories feel timeless (telegrams from 1943, recipes in grandmother's handwriting, winding a father's watch), others are unmistakably contemporary: A FaceTime call across time zones, deleted browser history, video calls from college, group chats turned off to avoid explaining loneliness. The collection reminds us that while technology has changed how we connect and conceal, the fundamental human experiences of grief, love, isolation, violence, devotion, and fear remain constant.

The Series

Behind Closed Doors joins the STORIES series, expanding the lens on the messy, devastating, beautiful lives we live behind closed doors. Where the Leo & Neil collection examined individual identity within partnership, Behind Closed Doors explores the hidden narratives between public performance and private truth. Placing these works on the blockchain, the technology ensures a permanent provenance for these brief glimpses behind closed doors.

Click to visit all 35 pieces on the Foundation platform

First 8 of 35 artworks from the Behind Closed Doors collection