Weird Good Byes

A part of my artistic practice is trying to portray emotions—and to portray emotions, you have to live through them.

These past few weeks, I’ve been revisiting the emotion of grief: the joy of happy memories, the difficulty of letting go again, and the reality of life after losing someone you love.
In March 2022, my grandmother passed away. She was one of those grandmothers who often felt more like a friend than an authority figure. Grandma Adeline took me on my first (and only) motorcycle ride, joined me in sewing classes, helped me create Halloween costumes, and showed up at every soccer game, dance recital, school play, and graduation. She was a constant presence in my childhood—stealing Splenda packets from restaurants and adding extra salt to her McDonald’s fries.
If you haven’t gathered by now, I really loved that lady. So when dementia slowly took her memories and her passing came sooner than expected, I was shattered. Her absence was deeply felt, and I still get choked up about it to this day.
My 2026 show was inspired by her. Her loss of memory made me think deeply about what it means to remember. I’ve read psychology papers on memory and considered it in the contexts of history, conservation, and preservation—thinking about what we, as a society, choose to value and hold onto.
But throughout this process, I always found something missing: the emotion.
After teachers’ college, I completed a year of study in Museum and Gallery Studies, where I learned both theoretical and practical skills in curation, public programming, cataloguing, and preservation. What stayed with me most were the exhibitions, objects, and histories that stirred emotion. Facts, statistics, and context were important, but they didn’t resonate with me in the same way.

So, in preparing for my show, I knew that if I wanted to explore memory in a meaningful way, I would have to bring forward the emotions I carry for my grandmother and my childhood.

Of course, saying that is much easier than doing it. Over the past six months, I’ve felt a lot of resistance. At times, I worried I would have little to show next year. But with time and patience, I’ve begun to make real progress on my piece about my grandmother—and it’s been a wild ride.

Grief is incredibly complex, because humans are incredibly complex. I loved my grandmother—she was my goofy, shining light. But she was also the first person to make me doubt my ability as an artist. While my family tells me they found my paintings in her house after she passed, her outward reaction to every artwork I gave her was dismissive: a quick “That’s nice,” followed by tucking it away. I remember being angry, even telling her I wouldn’t give her any more art because she acted like she hated it.

When we grieve, our memories do strange things. I felt guilty for remembering her in that way. For holding onto a negative moment. It made me feel like I had to come up with three positive memories to outweigh one bad one. My inner dialogue told me: She’s gone—you can’t be mad at her.

But grief reminds me that she was fully human—someone with both positives and negatives. She made me feel immense love and safety, but also frustration and sadness. To deny those mixed emotions wouldn’t be fair—to her or to me, both fully complex humans in our own right.

So I found myself lovingly drawing her, then washing the drawing away—because memory fades with time. I spent an afternoon, sitting on the floor with that drawing, eating her marshmallow salad and crying over every good and sad memory I had of her.

This summer, I created far less artwork than I planned, but I spent more quality time with my grandmother than I’ve had since high school. I heard wonderful stories about her from family members and poured over the scrapbooks she made of my dancing years.

Reliving grief wasn’t a five-star experience—my poor nose from all the tissues I needed can attest to that—but it was oddly beautiful, deeply cathartic, and exactly what the work needed.
If I have nothing else for my 2026 show, at least I will have my grandma—and that, in itself, is worthy of an exhibition.