Behind the Painting - Unfounded

The English language simply does not have enough words for pain. As somebody who wields the dictionary like both a weapon & an accessibility aid, I have a great love for ultra-specific words. Like, only once in a blue moon will that ever be appropriate to use in a sentence kind of words.

Language flattens emotion. Peak hour traffic is horrible, but so is a burning, itching cold sore. Two very different states, reduced to the same, inefficient word? Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, has more than 96 words to describe love. 

English, by comparison, fails us. The adjectives are too versatile, and in-depth texts quickly clutter when enhanced description is needed. It cannot capture the nuances of the emotion it calls grief, or the sharpness of the rug pull. This is why I became a visual communicator. Visual language bypasses the limits of written language by hacking directly into core human instincts. We are wired to respond in certain ways to different visual stimuli. Red raises the heart rate, blue slows the breathing, and yellow increases suicide rates (true!).

 I use visual art and design to communicate to my audiences a pain too complex & personal to translate into words. A piece is not finished until I can see my emotions staring back at me. Using colour & texture as my tools, I paint to memorialise these moments of intense emotion in my life. The sole intention of my works is to make you feel how I have felt.  By combining traditional & digital mediums, I can overcome the barriers of traditional communication to present a much more nuanced, first hand experience of pain.

Picture this. Covid lockdown, I’m sixteen. Rollerskating on the deck because what else can I do at this point? I get an Instagram message.

Why did they use past tense?

‘Unfounded’ was made in the memory of my best friend & twin flame. The boy with whom I shared heart and mind, who saw things how I did when nobody else could.

We met on the first day of camp.

After 10 months, my mental health was in a complete freefall. A mixture of social isolation, autistic adolescence

I transferred back to my previous high school. Julian said he understood.

Julian committed suicide in his childhood bedroom two weeks before Australia’s QLD lockdowns lifted in 2020. He was found by his parents the next morning. It was five days after my 16th birthday.

Grief takes many forms, all of them hard to describe.

Unfounded captures the complexity of suicide & teenage grief. It is my experience being plunged into an ocean of baseless blame, regret, implications & existentialism at the ripe age of sixteen years old.