"Insight" Artwork - Limited Edition of 2

The beauty of a tree begins at its roots.
But what if those roots are embedded in earth that drank the blood of soldiers and the tears of mothers?
My bloodline began with a man who understood the language of trees, and continued with a man who survived hell only to build walls meant to protect us.
But walls built out of fear eventually become both a foundation and a prison.
Two Eights. Who holds the key?
On one bank of the river stands Saint Kilian, a silenced spiritual center. Born from the depths and the untamed fire that tore the earth apart in a primal scream six hundred million years ago.
I feel that same wildly creative fire flowing through my pelvis. I recognize in it the breath of ancestors who were never allowed to scream.
On the opposite bank rises a hill, drilled with holes by men in black uniforms like worms into an apple, hiding their twisted treasures and weapons.
Its soul is different. A silence that lasted tens of millions of years, before the soft clay was crushed into solid stone under the weight of oceans and ages.
Just as the fear of my lineage transformed into a silence lasting generations. Just as my mother’s pain transmuted into the anxiety in my own gut.
And right between these two banks—between sanctity and depravity, between fire and silence, between truth and illusion—flows my blood.
It took me twenty-five years to understand that my illness is not my own. That the heavy pressure on my chest is the weight of the dirt on my grandfather’s grave, and the anxiety in my gut is the fear of my grandmother, who chose to burn photographs rather than bear the truth.
I am the one who saw the festering in my brother's throat mirrored in my mother’s heart, when the lie could no longer be swallowed.
I was born from the massive fault line of this landscape. From explosion and silence, from blood and stone.
My work bears the record of how geological chaos is reflected in the human body and spirit. How the fire that once ripped apart the primordial ocean floor continues to breathe through generations. Through my body, through my mother's body, through my grandfather. How the silence that forged clay into stone continues in each of us who were crushed and recast by the pressure of history.
Two Eights is a story about a rupture. About that gap in our genome where the light escapes.
About how truth heals the rift.
A truth that is harder than stone
and hotter than fire. A truth not born of fire will never withstand the pressure.
I know that pressure.