Mothers turns on the tension between presence and impermanence, where identity feels simultaneously held, reflected, and slipping away. Saturated color meets grays and blacks that reveal only partial hints of the women’s faces and bodies; their forms appear as worn paper fragments suspended within the merging reflections of a glass globe, a jug, and a Ball canning jar. These vessels behave like mnemonic instruments — objects that hold memory imperfectly — and the painting’s fractured surfaces echo a deeper mnemonic longing, a desire to recover what remains only in traces.
A flower’s stile reaches toward the center, meeting the script letters r and e directed toward the jar’s mouth, while T.H.E.Y. spans the top edge like a half‑remembered invocation. The bottle top repeats in sketched lines, and jagged black shapes drift across the surface and edges, reading as both forms and voids. Together, these elements create a visual field where memory is never whole: it is pieced together, refracted, and continually threatened by erasure. The painting inhabits that fragile space — the longing to retrieve what is unremembered, and the recognition that only fragments remain.
The treatment of the painting surface reflects what I found by using the collection of photo images. Their physical state didn’t inspire the exploration so much as affirm it; the worn, damaged photographs complemented my interest in fragmentation and the human need for solidity as a form of security. The elements I used in the painting are clearly attached to my early career exposure to modernist visualization, where the instability of the image becomes a way of thinking about the instability of memory itself.