im doing my best to lay the child down tenderly and not walk away with bitterness on my arms
This piece is from my BFA show in 2025. It is what I consider the culmination of all my work I was doing in undergrad. The grand finale if you will.
When I started college, I went through a long, painful, and messy falling out with my childhood best friend that clouded most of those years with grief.
The fall of my junior year I started messing with making ceramic objects move and created a piece called we were girls once. While making the piece, the surface decoration reminded me of the sprinkles on cosmic brownies.
I was flooded with memories of my old friend and I coming home from school, grabbing two cosmic brownies out of the pantry, and then launching into a sprinkle trade where we debated who got what color sprinkle.
Posting that piece on social media was really difficult since I knew she would see it. There was also a part of me that hoped she would reach out after seeing it, but she didnt.
I spent a lot of years in denial that our friendship was over, and that she had become really awful towards me. I never thought I would have to picture life without her in it, I didn’t even know how.
I knew that leaving undergrad would mean the end of us circulating each others lives, the end of our mutal connections, and I wanted to symbolize moving on within a piece for my senior show. She was the first piece I made in that body of work, and she would also be the last.
I finished this piece the night before install, and barely got it done in time for the show. It was also my most complex neon/ ceramic work up to that point.
I programmed a controller to fade the red neon in and out to the speed of slowing breaths. I like to relate the two forms to the two of us, the fading neon symbolizing the ending of our friendshipship. The light never fully turns off because in many ways we will always be connected.
I feel a lot of peace when I look at this work. I was finally ready to accept and let go, life did not end without her. I found along the way in my grief people who were able to see and connect with my life in ways I never thought possible.
I got to begin again.
