The Minutes before his Final Departure

This piece belongs to a suite of textile and wood panel collages addressing the themes of death and new beginnings. The works were developed during an artist residency in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, prior to the Day of the Dead in 2016.

Earlier that year I had lost my father to cancer, and this had opened my heart to the importance of creating space to grieve. I began to understand mourning as the act of naming and honoring what a loved one meant to me. Experiencing the death of someone as close to me as my father allowed me to embrace the full range of human emotions, including the dark ones. I fell apart with the grief, but I also felt a tremendous urge to experience joy in my art and to make my practice more meaningful and fulfilling. The art in this series explored the full...