These Four Walls, 2021
These Four Walls features paintings made between 2019 and 2021, spanning a 2-year period in which I moved six times, living in six different homes—one of those temporary homes was one room where I frequently lay bed-ridden staring primarily at one wall and the ceiling as I recovered from ankle surgery. Just after moving into my first solo apartment, the pandemic hit, prompting me to familiarize myself with the particular “four walls” of my apartment; in quarantine, I re-encountered haunting and historic versions of myself and past-homes that surfaced in the face of moving towards more independence and the aloneness therein. Nevertheless, resilient and self-preserving parts of myself rose to the occasion with fierceness and care as I integrated these formative experiences into layers of new development, building myself my first ever home.
We are all in development. These stories are of those stunted parts, how to help them grow up and integrate into our adult-selves, and what we can become if we are brave enough to love what we have been through and bold enough to choose the future-selves we dare believe in.
It starts with possibility—parent and child—and all the need, longing, and bright-eyed excitement a child can shoulder on their giddy knees. And separation. There’s always separation (that’s how we know what touching is). The dropped other-end of a tin can telephone and waiting. When nobody at all is thinking of you, do you still call it freedom? Will you make-believe with me? There’s a story I cannot tell alone.
I was once an egg too...
Birth
I was once an egg too.
Inside myself for insulation,
round and bloody.
I always thought
hatching would be
more like a somersault.
I grow quicker
than I can peck
my way out—or in.
I ask my parents
to smile for me
one last time
before I make a mess
of all this hope.
Nest
The Heart of Breaking
Compost
Every time I am rotten, I dig myself
into the soil and start over, again,
from the ground, where to decay
is to renew. What a blessing it is,
to be always incomplete.
Permission to burrow, and then
flourish into my most comfortable form,
unexpected.
