the shifting place
This body of work was created during an artist residency in Newfoundland.
Surrounded by the stark landscape and black slate cliffs, I found myself suspended. Just days earlier, I learned of my mom’s terminal illness. Caught between the sharpness of now and the weight of what was to come. I saught grounding as I braced for loss.
Artist Statement
This body of work was created during my artist residency in Newfoundland. I arrived in a stark, wild landscape already suspended. Just days before, my mom had been diagnosed with a second fast-moving terminal illness. I was caught between the life we had shared and the loss rushing toward us—still distant, but certain.
In those early days, I was drawn to surface things: jagged slate underfoot, salt-thick air, the weight of the ocean. But every attempt to land in the present came with an edge. Each video call with her felt like a goodbye I couldn’t grasp. Raw with the truth of impermanence, disbelief settled in me. In that stillness, I felt a quiet urgency to move. I carried, poured, soaked. That’s how the work began.
There was no escape from this sharp new reality—but I found something else. The black slate cliffs along the coast were vast, unshrinking. As the ocean hurled itself at them with a fury you could feel in your bones, they held. In their unyielding presence, I found a way to stay upright while everything inside me tilted.
That primal connection began to shape the work. Each day I stood with the cliffs, I let their strength climb into me. The act of standing, watching, waiting became its own kind of preparation.
I gathered black slate, hauled ocean water by the bucket. What emerged wasn’t technique, but ritual—a meditative way of being with what I couldn’t control. I mixed the saltwater with pigments, tilted canvases, and watched shapes drift, settle, split. Veins spread like memory through the soaked canvas, echoing the cliffs–enduring. I gave shape to what steadied me.
“The shifting place” became where I lived—between connection and grief, between what would be torn from me and what I could carry.
Some pieces are defined and still. Others unravel with longing too wild to contain. The ones made near the end, when I let feeling come through unfiltered, were the hardest to face. They revealed something unguarded. I could barely look at them without breaking.
But this is what the work asked of me: to stay with what was most fragile. And in that act, I was changed.