It was the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college and I found myself on a date with a coworker at a pizza restaurant around the corner from where we worked.
When we sat down, there was a young girl sitting with her family a few tables over staring at me.
I started staring back.
This went on for quite some time, each of us examining and pondering about the other.
We were frozen there, together, just staring.
She was holding awe and excitement, hoping one day, she too could be like me.
This was a familiar stare, one i did many times as a child, I recognized it immediately. She thought I was cool.
And as I sat there, for the first time ever on the other side of this stare I knew all too well, I felt immense sadness.
I was holding the pain of womanhood, wishing to spare her from its fate. I couldn’t help but think of all the cruel things I had endured, and all the terribly cruel things that awaited her in life. How we are helpless in changing this fate.
I have referred to this moment ever since as a mirror tunnel.
I’ve spent years pondering on this moment. For a long time I wanted to make a piece on it. I spent countless hours sketching around it and I always seemed to come up short. No matter what I tried, nothing ever felt like it captured the profoundness I was seeking in portraying a mirror tunnel.
I finally called it quits on trying to force a project and decided the piece would find me when it was ready to become, even if it took decades.
This is a conversation held over and over amongst women and girls. Its a mirror tunnel between generations. Decades of grief and joy bottled up in one split second, shared in a glance on a random Tuesday night while eating pizza.
girl again
What I didn’t notice for a long time, is that all my incomplete mirror tunnel sketches, became other pieces. They lended themselves to new concepts and inspired new experiments.
Around this time, is when I started to feel like maybe I had finally found a style for my work. I kept leaning in and exploring it, and we have stumbled our way through this rabbit hole all the way to present day girl again.
I still hold out hope that Mirror Tunnels of Woman and Girl will one day see itself into actuality, when it’s ready to enter the world. Until that moment, I honor its presence and influence in my work and acknowledge its impact on all my pieces made over the last 3 years.
Its grandness is undeniable, palpable.
I do not remember anything from that date except the girl at the table on the other side of the room. We are immortalized in that split second forever. On hot summer days, I am reminded that we still remain there 3 years later, sparing each other from the world’s depravity, protected and held softly in our longing.
