Self Portrait (2019) clay, glaze, and twine

The hardest and most traumatic experience I have ever gone through was the sudden loss of my brother Michael in 2019. Navigating this loss is something I still struggle with to this day and will probably be a life-long battle. We were very close and in his passing, I have felt a lot of guilt attached to my grief. These pieces, many of which are adorned with handles, are things I have carried with me through my process of coping and grieving. These thoughts act as self-portraits, as well as the inclusion of a self-portrait of me at the time, having just cut my hair very short for the first time. Having worked with the motif of textures from the hand for a while before this, but still in connection to loss, this work, through text and texture, confronts those who have not experienced a loss similar to what I have with the understanding of how intense the emotional weight that comes with this can be.