Shinigami, 2017

Until 2016, death had been a relative stranger to me. In that year, 6 people close to me had died very suddenly, including my mother in November. When I was able to go back to my work, the subject of death was all I could think about. Nobody knows how long my mom had been sick because she’d kept it secret. I just got a call out of nowhere that she was in palliative care and refusing to see anyone. She died just a few weeks later. At the time I’d begun working on a figure with an asian face. It sat unfinished for months. When I finally went back to work, that floating asian face became the painting “Lightning Seed.” I was reading asian mythology around themes of dying. I landed on the story of Shinigami, a Japanese version of the Grim Reaper. It felt removed enough from the reality of everything but it still allowed me to sit with my thoughts about death without being overcome by the loss. In this series I reimagined the Shinigami as courtesans of a 1920’s opium den. The figures exist in the space between life and death helping others to cross over. Ultimately it ended up being a kind of requiem for my mother.