Ti credo

From the Artist: When I read an essay published by Bridget Read in The Cut titled ‘Things we Heard’, it took me on a journey through the pandemic from the sounds experienced over 2020. Silence, sirens, clapping, protest, quiet, music. In overwhelming times, this classification of time by sensation helped me understand how to begin processing a profoundly altered personal and global world through my visual practice. This resulted in a six-part series of watercolor paintings.

This painting addresses the thin, inscrutable threshold between life and the absence of life. Throughout the pandemic I could feel the walls of our apartment like membranes, the building like a body. I could hear thuds, soft voices, and sharp cries from neighbors across this membrane. During this time, my beloved grandfather lost his life to COVID. Alone, quarantined in a hospital, he passed away unable to be in the comfort of his loved ones. This severance of physical connection has prolonged and exacerbated our family’s ability to process our loss. In apartments, networks of disconnected communities, all over the world people are grieving loss of life, work, normality, and more. There is a grief pandemic alongside the COVID pandemic, and I wonder what such extensive collective grief might mean, and how it might manifest.