The roiling stinkpot that was 2022 got me started down the road to a new kind of image creation. My mom passed, I left my job, had a long-awaited surgery, and I was becoming increasingly alarmed, like many others, by the growing number of Americans charmed by solicitors of distrust and disinformation. In one moment, I'm trying to parse out the emotional and monetary values of my mother's possessions and in the next, American women have lost their reproductive autonomy and 19 children are shot dead in Texas.     

This set is inspired by the sappy nostalgia of Norman Rockwell paintings on commemorative plates.  Many of the cracked and creaky New England antiques passed down on my mom's side are black with hand-painted gold flourishes. The women in my family going back a hundred years always had a can of gold paint to make something old new again. To give every indication that all is well and nothing is wrong, like some kind of Colonial Kintsugi. 

My hope is that we are ultimately strengthened and renewed in the wake of our individual and collective grief.  That we can commemorate the dire hours by finding beauty in them. Somehow.