To Hold onto Lost Intimacies

To Hold onto Lost Intimacies, is a reckoning of loss and grief, and an attempt to understand the materiality of the body. At the center of this project is a thread—one of love, of sentimentality, of a transcendence of ephemerality.  I set about to use objects passed down to me through my family, taking rubbings of these objects on canvas, then reiterating them through paint with emotive color. I constructed canvases that are equivalent in height to my body and circumference of my waist to create a mirror of my experience with these objects. To me, these paintings act as bodies. They are ephemeral, capturing a fleeting moment of reflection of individuals and my relationships with them. This project was a reparation for my dysmorphic view of my body and how it exists in society, and a way to reflect on places of femininity and viscerality–two seemingly opposing agents. I sought to create paintings that could act as meditative, a place of reflection—allowing for myself, and potentially others to find solace.

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The dimensions of these canvases are taken directly from the artist's height, and the circumference of her waist. The gloves, vase, locket are made through the frottage method or tracing of the individual objects onto the canvas. The gloves were gifted to the artist's upon the passing of her grandmother, as well as the green vase. The daffodils represent the flowers that once grew in her grandmother's garden, as well as the hyacinths present in the green vase painting. The artist and her grandmother spent much of their time together cutting fresh flowers and making arrangements for their home. Each object represented through these paintings belonged to a different female figure in the artist's family. They are used to represent lineage through a family, the preciousness of holding onto objects that once belonged to those who are no longer with us.