It is a stuck door latch jammed by rust, a cycle of self-perpetuating tragedy.
Grief is a container for a reason. It is there to restrain, to wear itself down.
Grief is vast and ungraspable. It is in every unfulfilled desire and unbearable feeling.
In my work, language, printmaking, and sculpture are my attempts at exteriorizing the private interiority of grief in metaphorical terms. Metaphors are frameworks, containers, repositories. The potential in metaphors to simultaneously reveal and obscure meaning drives my use of metaphor to mediate the harsh realness of trauma as a processing mechanism, as well as a screen for self-protection.
Metaphorical analogies become tangible through the materiality of prints and sculptures made and altered by my own hands. As labor concretizes my use of metaphors as a physical and time-based process, I translate metaphorical language into into something that is actual and felt—in the scent of roses, the rawness of red meat, the coarseness of sand, the scratchy residue of erased text.