This winter, Melissa Moria is an artist-in-residence at Instituto Buena Bista (IBB) in Curaçao. After years of working on projects in her native Rotterdam, she aims to boost her practice by returning to its core: painting itself. During this residency, Moria aims to understand why she is so strongly drawn to certain hues; how color, material, and emotion are structurally intertwined in her work. Working with natural pigments, sourced from the Curaçao region, forces her to slow down and return to the origins of those colors. By embedding this artisanal process in her daily work, she expects to gain new insights into how color carries and shapes her paintings. Once back in Rotterdam, Moria will translate the knowledge and experience she has acquired into new work, as a foundation for the further development of her painting practice.