For me, creating this body of work was something that built bridges between the past, the present, and the future; through a variety of attempts, sketches, lost canvases, and long nights reminiscing with my family, I was able to create paintings that emulate the shadowy, ever present undercurrent that grief and memory leaves behind when you lose a loved one. In the wake of my grandfather’s passing, I was struck with this omnipresent grief that I felt every day - his passing occurred in a storm of chaos in my life during my first winter break of college, and it knocked me off my feet in ways I could not have expected. In a whirlwind of changes, I was handed something stable - a palpable grief that I felt like I had no room to carry, but no room to put down.

When I returned in the spring semester, I began creating art about it, a slow, tumultuous, and obsessive attempt to lessen the grief that I carried with me every day. I painted remnants of you on photographs, I sculpted hands in an attempt to feel you again, I sketched the ghosts of you that I saw everywhere I went. When I visited your house for the final time, I took pictures on your camera, hoping to be able to capture how I remembered the home where I had you. In these paintings, I hope to showcase the love, loss, and hazy memory of a person who is no longer reachable.

I carry these obsessions with me in my everyday life, the memories of you and the fleeting time, and the questions that surround everything that I do. What do I still have of you? What pieces can I take with me? Can you see what I’ve done, what I’ve accomplished? What would you change? What would you tell me? Would you like him? Would you like me? I am so different now from who I was, and there is no way for me to know what you would think of the life I’ve created, the girl I have grown into after all of these years, when I don’t know when you stopped knowing me. What I can hope is that you would like what I’ve created, and would see yourself in the pieces. I love you.