Created in 2019, this mosaic is more symbolic than a lot of my work. Well, it may be more accurate to say that I am more aware of its symbolism than I may be in a lot of my other work. The making of this work became more and more personal as it progressed, which was both good and bad.
Bad in that it became so stressful by the end that I messed up my jaw and had months of resulting pain that an acupuncturist finally connected to my jaw. Too much clenching. Good in that it served as a months-long meditation about my own family history, which helped me put things in a broader and clearer perspective.
Familial Wounds (2019) 29” x 38” | 74cm x 97cm. Smalti, mosaic gold, porcelain, colored cement. In a private collection.
Here is a description of the work:
It was the concept of psycho-emotional wounds from which this mosaic initially emerged. As it progressed, I began to meditate more about my own interior wounds, which refined the meaning of this work to that of familial wounds, in particular. I thought of generations past, on both my mother’s and father’s side, and how wounds, in the form of unhealthy behavior patterns, had been passed down through the ancestral lines. Some of our wounds are of this kind of ancestral lineage. Other wounds we acquire as we live and grow and navigate our current lives, and they may be the start of new unhealthy generational patterns as we unconsciously pass them on to our children.
The mosaic suggests two levels of wounding. The dimensional wounds are active wounds, ones that agitate us in present time. These wounds have not yet healed and scarred over, and they still influence, may even dictate, our current behavior. The less apparent wounds are in the background, etched into our interior landscape. They may be scars—the remnants of fully healed wounds—or they may be dormant, awaiting certain circumstances to come to the surface.
Our wounds live deep in our blood-red tissues. Even when healed, the scars remain. They are part of who we are, not just things that happened to us. They shape and define us, for good and for ill. No matter how much we may suffer, however, there is always hope to be found in the light of awareness and understanding, indicated by the gradation toward the upper left of the mosaic. And, healing is always in progress by our bodies’ own mending energies, and by divine grace, both of which are expressed in the gold, lightning-like veins.
Familial Wounds, side perspective detail