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Vital Signs is a collection of work that is in progress comprised of multimedia paintings and installation pieces exploring life cycles both literally and figuratively. This work

honors the grief caused by loss, while simultaneously extending beyond to extract the beauty of healing and rebirth through the lens of death. It sifts through the raw,

intimate spaces these experiences create and highlights the cultural rituals surrounding these unavoidable facts of life.

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The origin of this work is rooted in my experience of being a caregiver to my partner, Andy Williams, after his cancer diagnosis, through his passing, and deconstructing this

new world enveloped by my loss. Through the use of portraiture, I have formalized my practice to transcend my specific narrative by building a bridge of exploration into

what at a glance looks like the common human experience. Putting each story under a microscope to extract and highlight how vastly different these experiences are

embodied depending on the uniqueness of each person’s story. I am interested in the inherent power of each individual’s identity, ancestral history, and passions that

transform the world and shift culture. Death can reach beyond just the literal transition of life and can extend to the loss of oneself due to trauma, or it can be the shifting environment of the natural world as a consequence of the impacts of climate change. Vital Signs is comprised of the Rebirth Series and the Death Cycles Series with each

work highlighting different moments within these rotations.

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This body of work is intended to be a space of collective healing as these stories ignite threads of familiarity and offer the space for the viewer to connect their own

experiences. As one of the nurses told me when Andy and I were leaving the hospital to go home to hospice, “there is no higher honor in life than to serve at someone’s

birth and to serve at someone’s death”. This collection of work is a tribute to those wise words giving space to honor and recognize those pivotal experiences.

 

 

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