Project Olive Juice:
While Mouthing Three Syllables
Mouth the words olive juice to someone across a room. The phrase disappears — and something else takes its place.
This collection departs from that silent exchange, interrogating the symbols humanity has long used to represent love. At its center: the heart — a form so universally recognized, so anatomically imprecise, that its persistence says more about human need than biological fact.
What began in 2020 as a daily creative practice — a commitment to making something new, every day, in every form — has grown into hundreds of works. Through graphic illustration, Olive Juice presents love not as a singular condition but as a living contradiction — tender and fractured, legible and elusive. Each work is an iteration of feeling rendered in form, inviting the viewer to consider what it means to express the inexpressible through symbols we inherit but rarely question.
Three syllables. Infinite iterations.
Before it became Project Olive Juice, the series began as UI LOVE — a drawing collection exploring the many universal forms of love through illustrated heart characters.The message was simple: U + I create unity. Universal love requires U and I.
What began as a playful visual language around heart characters evolved into a deeper investigation of love, symbols, language, and perception. The early UI LOVE drawings used character, expression, color, and repetition to show love as something shared, plural, and constantly transforming.
As the work expanded, the project moved from a direct message of universal love into a more layered study of how love is communicated — through symbols we inherit, words we misread, gestures we recognize, and feelings we struggle to name.
At its center remains the heart: a universal icon, a character, a container, a contradiction.
Started in 2020 as a daily creative practice, the collection has grown into hundreds of works across drawing, digital illustration, motion, and visual experimentation. Through each iteration, the heart becomes more than a symbol of romance. It becomes a study of connection — between self and other, image and meaning, U and I.