The first piece in this series, Descents into the shadow, was created to materialize a new insight about myself into a tangible, external object. 

The insight emerged around my 38th birthday, when a series of subtle events and a growing openness to self-observation helped me recognize deep patterns related to emotional attunement, internalized responsibility, and how some of us develop chameleonic, people-pleasing behaviours as coping mechanisms to feel safe. The price we pay for love is often our sense of self. 

Creating this piece from that thought process felt deeply cathartic, like releasing a pressure valve, and it allowed me to decouple myself from the wound and observe it with more objectivity and kindness. 

Working with blackout text allowed me to invite hazard, chance, and my subconscious to give voice to something that was almost out of reach: “Instinctively, (I) knew when to smile”; “mother, (we) had become strangers”; “unti”, “after”, “still”.