A year after my mother died, I moved to Canada thirty-one weeks pregnant with my second child. I spent the majority of that first year pushing a stroller around Hamilton, Ontario by day and writing to a penpal in Boston—the population researcher Leah Abrams, whose young husband was dying of brain cancer—by night. Leah and I wrote to each other incessantly. We referred to this period as the “winter machine,” a reference to a line from a song by Dar Williams. Being in the winter machine was needing to tell the whole story of what happened to us, over and over and over again. 

Emergence is about stepping out of the winter machine, about loosening my grip on the particular details of my own story. Each piece in the series began as a set of 30-second to five-minute drawings (mostly figure drawings), which I juxtaposed and layered on top of one another. I used acrylic and collage to develop the environments around the characters I’d created—in the process, inevitably transforming the characters themselves. The resulting mixed-media paintings depict both the tenderness and the resilience of these imaginary figures and shapes navigating daily life in the omnipresence of loss.