Where we belong

Original artwork measuring 48h x 60w x 2.5 inches deep. Completed in 2021, the piece is mixed media - acrylic paint and collage (including vintage prints, sewing patterns, vintage book pages, old letters, various kinds of paper, and other ephemera). This piece has themes of family, found family, trust, & love. It’s a celebration of the unique individuality we all carry and that we all should treasure in ourselves and others. I am the 3rd child in a wonderful family of five. My two older siblings were adopted as babies (separately) and I’m a biological child of our parents. We are all still here, still healthy, and still valuing and appreciating each other. Actually, I think with hindsight (now stretching decades) we’re able to appreciate our distinct attributes and personalities even more. And the fact that family members can be so different from each other- and that those very differences make every family unique- made its way into the piece. I also realize outside of my own personal history is an extremely wide range of life experiences. This is why I wanted to broaden the meaning of this piece to include ideas about found family as well. For so many of us it's the people we meet along our way through life who become our family & give our time here more meaning. I purposely didn’t create a family of foxes or family of deer. It needed to be more expansive. Each figure in the piece brings their own past, and it’s made them the “person” they are. They fully accept each other and completely embrace their differences with love and empathy. My husband wrote a poem specifically for the piece which tells all of this so beautifully (it's included in the images).