Inherited Painting

In this painting I used an object that was left in my mother’s flat after she passed away. This antique stoneware bottle was always part of my childhood, existing on the peripheral of my memory. It was an object my mother used to decorate her home with. She moved a good few times after I left home so the idea of a childhood home that I could return to for comfort was transplanted onto objects like these.Now, almost 5 years after my mother passed away from brain cancer, I’m making these paintings of objects that I know so intimately, these objects that remind me of my mother and how she would take such loving care in making her home a beautiful and inviting space. This is also the first time I leaned heavily into the traditional genre of still life painting, where every object has significance and meaning except here I’m not working from an established catalog of symbolism but rather my own. Where the shell (belonging to my mother’s twin sister) express a steady, methodical deepening of my understanding of life as I was witnessing the gentle fading of a dying parent. And where the apple expresses the experience of a kind of fall from Eden or innocence when you leave the hospice room for the last time knowing you will never see her face again.