Behind Closed Doors Collection

Friday 27 February 2026

TLDR

• 35 hand-painted cubist house exteriors, each paired with a 30-word micro-story about what happens inside

• The cubist form mirrors the concept: a single perspective fractured into multiple narratives of suburban normalcy

• The second collection in the 2026 STORIES series

Behind Closed Doors is the second collection in the 2026 STORIES series: 35 hand-painted cubist house exteriors, each paired with a 30-word micro-story about what happens inside. The cubist form is deliberate. Just as cubism fractures a single perspective into multiple viewpoints, these stories fragment the assumed narratives of suburban normalcy. Every house looks ordinary from the outside. Nothing inside is. 

The collection grew from a straightforward observation: we live alongside people we fundamentally do not know. We wave cheerfully at neighbours whose lives we never see, walk past houses whose doors conceal realities we would never imagine from the footpath. Private life is not what the façade suggests. Behind Closed Doors asks what those realities actually look like, without flinching and without judgment.

The 35 stories explore a range of emotional tones. A family portrait taken the week before a diagnosis. A retired teacher navigating a medical cannabis prescription and a pension that doesn't stretch. A woman rehearsing explanations for bruises before waving cheerfully at her neighbour. A couple dancing without music, dementia taking the words and leaving the movement. Three generations kneading dough, the recipe never written down. The collection moves through these moments with deliberate emotional rhythm, breathing room between devastating pieces, connection arriving where it isn't expected.

The stories resist easy categorisation. Concealed grief and quiet rituals sit alongside mounting anxieties and unexpected tenderness. Joy and devastation sit alongside each other because that is how private life actually works. The houses we pass contain as much tenderness as violence, as much hope as despair. Behind every closed door lives a complete, complex human reality. This collection makes that visible.

As the second collection in the STORIES series, Behind Closed Doors moves outward from where Leo & Neil began. Where that collection looked inward at two people, this one looks across a street, a suburb, thirty-five separate lives.

35 pieces. Minted on objkt.com.

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STORIES: Behind Closed Doors is part of an ongoing 2026 STORIES series exploring intimate human experience through compressed narrative and hand-painted artwork.