I Got Gams

Jan Preisler (1872-1918, Czech) ~ Diana, 1908

Wild Blackberries - Lucy Clayton

British , b. 1970s

“Giant sorrows”

18x24

Acrylic on canvas

Unfinished??

I dyed my hair green 7 months after my mom passed.

The months leading up to this; I wanted to preserve any amount of me that she knew.

Yet desperately craved a change.

I’m not sure I really realized how much a simple shift like this would impact me.

Immediately after I regretted it.

Not because I burned my hair - well maybe a little because I burned it.

More-so, after it felt like there was no going back. Beforehand my hair was the same color and length it was when I knew her.

But now I was different, someone she didn’t know anymore. A stranger. It almost felt like I wasn’t me anymore.

Letting go a part of me that died with her.

Slowly I grew to adjust to the change, but slowly I realized a different grief. I would visually see the hair I knew my mom with grow out.

I guess this piece is to further articulate those ideas.

How big grief can feel, yet how vulnerable it is.

The figure in the foreground is supposed to represent me in the present.

Struggling to slay something that cannot be killed off.

I like to imagine they’re having a conversation.