Ratman began as a book — mostly drawings, made by Soraya Hutchinson while she was pregnant with her first child. The early notebook held the project’s first questions: about innocence and responsibility, the weight of consumer life, and the strange grace of parenting.

In the later years the work changed shape. What had begun as a private conversation between Soraya and the canvas grew into a three-way exchange — Soraya, her husband JP Rautio, and the painting itself, each pulling on the others. What emerged was a deeper understanding of acceptance and discovery — the sense that the work belongs to the conversation, not to any single voice within it.