‘The Thing Is’ encompasses a body of work that was completed between 2021 – 2022; it represents an attempt to work through the experience of losing my dad in early 2021 (as both a meditation exercise and an escapist endeavour). The show’s title is taken from an Ellen Bass poem, which speaks to the experience of profound loss, and the ultimate decision to embrace life in spite of what Bass refers to as, “an obesity of grief”.

The work is multi-coloured and densely layered with a mixture of acrylic paint, oil pastels and black gesso. Its fluid and indistinct forms collapse into and over one another, mimicking the incoherence and kaleidoscopic nature of emotional upheaval and the unfamiliar experience of navigating grief for the first time.