Tag: Grief

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Celebrating Rejection

Artists are rejected all the time.

We submit.
We wait.
We receive the no.

And I am learning to celebrate it.

During my CritLab fellowship, artist and curator Patricia Miranda offered a reframe that shifted me:

Celebrate the rejection.

Because rejection means you participated.
It means you answered the call.
It means you allowed yourself to be seen.

I recently submitted my Mummy Bears to a call centered on grief. That submission, not the outcome, was the milestone.

The Mummy Bears are for me and my dad. Every year on my birthday, March 11, he gave me a teddy bear and called me Bear. After dementia took his memory and he passed at Thanksgiving 2024, I began wrapping the bears. Preserving what I could.

Submitting that work was the next step in processing my grief.

The no does not change the ritual.
It does not change the love.

It simply confirms that I am participating.

As my birthday approaches, the day I feel his absence most,  I am proud that I pressed submit. That I let my grief breathe outside the studio.

Rejection is not failure.

It is proof that I am still making.
Still risking tenderness.
Still moving forward.

And that is worth celebrating.
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Marking a Year of Remembering

This week marks one year since my father’s passing, November 22.
In that time, there have been so many milestones without him: his birthday, my birthday, holidays that felt quieter, thinner somehow. Each one has been a reminder of his absence, but also of the love and ritual that remain.

I’ve been working through the loss with my Mummy Bear series; a practice that began long before he died, when his memory started to fade. Every year since, I’ve created a new bear as an act of remembrance, a way to preserve our bond through my hands. What began as grief work has evolved into something larger, a visual language for love, memory, and transformation.

Grief doesn’t move in a straight line. It loops and unravels, it knots itself into the fabric of daily life. As I approach this anniversary, I find myself both heavy and grateful, for the years we had, for the ritual of making, for the quiet ways art holds what words cannot.

Each Mummy Bear is a conversation between what was and what remains. In the knotting, the wrapping, the layering, I find him, and, in some small way, find myself again.