Broken, Tattered, Healing, Whole

Broken, Tattered, Healing, Whole, 2024. Anointing oil, eucalyptus oil, and oil paint; Belle’s ashes; acrylics; chain; cigarette burns; found bone, bird wing, branches, feathers, and thorn; holy water; gauze; gold leaf; graphite; gouache; medical tape; pressed leaves; salt; scripture; stone collected from the San Luis Rey River; tears; thread; and wool. Commissioned by Oceanside Museum of Art in partnership with the Women’s Resource Center, with special thanks to Curator Smadar Samson for your love for the people and for encouraging us to confront this very difficult and important issue.

A prayer for freedom for the ones who find themselves under the heels of the oppressors, a prayer of protection over the ones who seek the courage to flee, and a prayer of praise for our survivors.

There are times when we encounter a suffering so immense that we fall prostrate upon the ground, wings aspen, surrendering desperately to things transcendent, that we might be made whole.

This work examines the passage of individual and generational inheritance, in trauma and in triumph, looking to time as mending agent. With thorn in flesh and tender bone, we strain to stand. We remind ourselves that we are tattered but in the state of repair, soon to be transformed. We are bruised and belovèd, aggrieved and adored, broken and blessed, crushed yet born from courage.

In working with materials temporal and delicate, I consider body as temple. The binding and mending of lacerations create intimacy with these materials whose purpose is to restore the afflicted. Medical tape and gauze seal the wounds. Thread inherited from my two late family members, Ba Ngoại (Grandmother) and my cousin Bi, suture the lesions. Eucalyptus oil, gifted to us from my mother-in-law, Dì Ba, acts as a salve. Anointing the downcast with blessèd oil, Sister Trish covers them in prayers of healing, protection, and deliverance. Paints inherited from my late belovèd sisters, Kelly and Jenny, bring color into sorrow as hope into darkness. Here, grief is met with grace.

At center, a figure crouches, compressed by agony. As a physical act of compassion, she has been washed over with holy water that has been collected from a church in which four generations of my family members have celebrated new birth, communion, union, and life everlasting.

This work serves as a call to sever these chains so that flight can achieve its good work.

Former things are passed away, behold all things are become new.