There are pieces I’ve made that felt like they were watching me long before I was ready to look back. They emerged not from conscious planning, but from somewhere deeper — a place that held feelings I didn’t yet have the words for. When I look at works like Melting, She, or Hollow, I see more than brushstrokes or shapes — I see emotional witnesses. They captured something I was navigating in real time: grief, identity, uncertainty, and the quiet unraveling of who I thought I had to be. In many ways, these works knew me before I could name what I was feeling.
Some are hard to look at. They represent the despair I felt many years ago — the feeling of having to fit into a particular mold, especially around religion. I spent years trying to hold onto a version of faith that didn’t align with who I was. Letting go of that world hurt people I loved, but staying in it was hurting me. Over time, I found peace in something much simpler: compassion, love, and acceptance. My work has often been the quiet place where I made sense of this shift — a space to unlearn judgment and rediscover freedom.
When I created pieces like Hollow or Melting and Lost, I didn’t set out with a clear intention. I was simply trying to stay afloat, to pour something out. It wasn’t until much later that I understood what those works were holding: the weight of being untethered. The loss of my mother. The aftermath of leaving an abusive marriage. The emptiness that followed when my father moved on and I was left with no clear place to land — no safety net.
My Nana, my mother’s mom, was that net. She listened. She made time. She held space for me in ways that few others could. During one of my hardest moments, a close friend welcomed me into her home. She became like a sister — someone who saw me at my lowest and still believed in me. That kind of love stays with you. It roots itself in your work, your healing, and your ability to move forward.
I didn’t name the collection Transmission right away. At the time, I was just creating through survival. But looking back, I can see how those works carried the energy I couldn’t express. They were raw, chaotic, deeply honest — visual transmissions of emotional truths I wasn’t ready to speak.
Hollow emerged from silence — not the peaceful kind, but the aching kind. It felt like a vessel. Something once full, now drained. The piece captured the spiritual fatigue I felt after holding so much for so long. And yet, there’s a part of it that still reaches. That flicker of wanting to reconnect with myself — to feel anything at all.
This piece came from disorientation. I felt like I was dissolving inside — trying to be who others needed me to be and losing my own reflection in the process. It wasn’t planned. It poured out in forms that couldn’t hold shape — much like I felt. This was me, being lost. And in painting it, I found a kind of strange clarity.
Womb holds a different kind of weight — the weight of a miscarriage I rarely speak about. This piece became a way to hold space for a grief that didn’t have a public shape. It was intimate, quiet, and painful. But it was also deeply spiritual. Womb is about loss, but also about creation — about reclaiming my body and honoring the complexity of what it means to carry and to let go.
Though it came before Womb, Birth feels like the first flicker of reclamation. A becoming. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was starting to trust my creative voice again. This piece doesn’t hold the same grief — instead, it pulses with potential. It’s about coming through. About starting again, even when you don’t know what the next step looks like.
Looking back, I didn’t always know what I was painting. I didn’t have a map — only emotion, instinct, and a need to move something through. But when I revisit these pieces, I realize they weren’t just expressions — they were mirrors. They saw me before I saw myself.
This is what I mean when I say The Art That Watches Back. These works stood with me — through grief, identity loss, unspoken trauma, and the slow rebuilding of my spirit. They didn’t just reflect who I was — they held what I was surviving.
And maybe, just maybe, they’ll do that for someone else too.
Because this is how I speak when words fall short. This is how I process, how I remember, how I heal.
