About me
I am a bereaved mother, multidisciplinary artist, performer, ritualist, end of life doula and hospice registered nurse. I have a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard University and am a reiki master, chaplain trained in Clinical Pastoral Education at UCSF, a certified Compassionate Bereavement Care Provider and HOPE Mentor through the MISS Foundation. My highest training started in April 2022 when I lost my beautiful seventeen-year-old son Ohia to suicide. I am also a mother to an amazing twenty-five-year-old son Tree.
I began painting about a year after the death of my child as a way to express my deep pain and love. Art making became a way to mourn, create meaning and beauty out of loss, and connect to pleasure and possibility.
In a culture that is death averse with so much fear and resistance around grief and grieving, I consider myself a truth teller around what it means to bear the unbearable. My calling is to continue to explore the intersection of creativity and grief, offering my work as an example of humility, reverence and resilience. I am here to support others who are grieving. I know it is vital to the healing of our communities to engage in conversations around the shadow of our culture, including child death and suicide.
I live with a wide open heart that can simultaneously hold the deepest sorrow and the most exquisite joy. I live with my beautiful queer family and community in the San Francisco Bay Area.
My creative process
I have come to know that pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow live in the same place in the heart and body. Before my child died there were many things that I did not consider, for example I did not think of myself as a visual artist. I rarely painted at all.
Towards the end of the first year after my child’s death, I bought some paints and brushes. I lit a candle, turned on some music and started an intuitive process of moving paint on paper. I rarely had a plan of where I was going and had little attachment to the outcome. In the process of painting, I would discover a color, shape or line that simply gave me pleasure. When the pleasure came, I trusted that feeling and would keep following it. I would add something, turn the painting around and keep going, adding and subtracting. If it felt good, I kept going. If it did not feel good, I would keep going knowing that something would eventually change.
I looked to my journal entries for the title of each painting. For the first two years I wrote daily letters to my child. In this way, these love letters find their way into the work and allow the painting to speak in a particular way.
I have taken these journal entries and have created a performance ritual offering of grief and praise. This show is transformative for me and those who witness and participate in it as collective trauma healing. I am currently working with a director to bring it to a public stage.
In the creative process I follow my longing, my desire and my connection to my child and to myself. In trusting the mystery, I give myself to grace and the possibility of revelation. It is here that I find my child and myself. Where are you? Where am I? Here I am, mystery. I am yours.
This is my offering.