I'm searching for myself.
When my mama died, I died too. The grief has since strangled me ~ I've become harder and harder to find.
Language is limiting. There aren't words to describe what's inside of me.
If I could just find a way to visualise everything I've been through, I might begin to understand it myself.
And maybe, within my own journey, you can find pieces of yourself too..
It was never a conscious choice to paint fairies, it just sort of happened..
In 2024, 21 years old, I'd just graduated the year before and had been working a corporate 9-5 since. In this time, I was overwhelmed by decisions, heartbreak, fear, euphoria. All of the confusion you feel in your twenties.
I wanted to express this somehow with paint and knew that one painting couldn't house all of it. These were such visceral emotions that somehow interconnected and I wanted to capture that.
I decided on 5 separate emotions that I felt encapsulated the major feelings I was experiencing. I wanted to create a cyclic storyboard that made sense together but also individually. I sketched countless ideas in my work breaks, and came up with many individual compositions but couldn't quite find a way to connect the paintings together..
One day it finally clicked ~ that I could use a fairy's environment to link them all. I could keep her surroundings similar in each painting but change elements slightly to mimic the specific story I'd like to tell.
This is how 'The Butterfly Effect' series was born.
I thought the fairies would be a one-time thing, but as I've sketched new paintings, this has fallen true for everything else ~ I can use so much of a fairy's world to create visual metaphors for the stories I want to tell.
Even though I started to paint fairies purely because it aided my story telling, it's quite sweet to know fairies hold a lot of sentiment for me.
My mama raised me with fairytales. When I was little she told me all girls with green eyes are fairies. Since we both have green eyes, she promised me that I too was a fairy, and one day I would grow wings ~ each night she would check if they'd grown.
Although she isn't here to see these paintings, she helped me sketch 'The Butterfly Effect' before she died. Her handwriting is still in my sketchbook ~ at least a part of her exists there.