Reborn

The original plaque artwork featured a unicorn laying in a meadow; it used to hang in my older sister’s bedroom when I was growing up, and later her fairly vast decorative unicorn collection was passed on to me when she got married when I was 10 years old (we have a nine year age gap). 

This piece was the first artwork I created when I first began to grieve the loss of my sister (and by proxy, my adult niece as well) to a transphobic cult by way of my brother-in-law (my sister’s second husband). So much of the landscape of my childhood memories feels scorched and marred by this bitter turn of events. While my sister and I were never particularly close siblings, a sort of baseline kinship always seemed to managed to permeate our relationship, distant as it may have been at times.

I have since come to terms with the fact that there was no baseline kinship, only a vague sense of longing that my naive and sensitive heart couldn’t bear to part with. 

So this piece depicts just that: The painful act of choosing to step out of and away from things that you no are not for you and are certainly not for your well-being. It can be raw and agonizing at times, but to choose to be Reborn, not in an ignoring of your past, but in a self-reconcilatory way of looking back and saying, “It’s okay that I was wrong. It’s okay things didn’t turn out how I had so deeply hoped they would. It’s okay.“