Preview
Creation Date
2024
Dimensions
42 inches by 42 inches
Materials
Charcoal and gesso on mounted drawing paper
Medium
Drawing
Project Advisor
Tony Conrad
Year of Graduation
2024
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
COinS
Artist Statement
In 2017, my grandmother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, a fast-progressing form of memory loss, and she passed in 2022. My family became her primary care givers for the five years she had the illness which was physically and mentally difficult for us all. These charcoal drawings represent the emotions that remain with me from the final years of her life and the experiences I had with her and the illness. Specific objects and spaces that remind me of these times are present in the drawings, such as pieces of furniture or certain rooms that were a prominent part of my time with her. As I work with charcoal, I find myself drawn to distorted bodies and grotesque features representing the confusion, lack of control, and fear that comes with cognitive illnesses. The process of adding, erasing, and experimenting with textures becomes a cathartic process as I work through the bottled-up emotions that I experienced during the final years of her life.