Living Room of Memories demonstrates my motivation to create as a need to understand, preserve, and process my personal history. This piece reflects how childhood memories decay, and become distorted over time, allowing me to confront the absence left by people, places, objects and moments that no longer exist.
As the starting point to a larger body of work exploring trauma and grief, this piece showed me that my creative motivation is deeply tied to emotional processing. Through repetitive linework, found imagery, and animation, I found a way to express the complicated feelings surrounding death in my family and the ways we collectively cope with grief. The swirling, overgrown linework became a visual language for the ominous presence of decay, reflecting how memory can feel both familiar and fantastical as it changes over time.
Ultimately, this artwork demonstrates my urge to create and give shape to the feelings and stories that are difficult to articulate in words. It demonstrates that my motivation comes from transforming personal pain into something visual, reflective, and connective, turning the complex topic of memory into an artwork that acknowledges loss, the process of grief, and the positive outlook of the future.