My painting practice is a critical and intimate exploration of connection and memory, focusing on the relationships that have shaped me. I examine home beyond a physical place and uncover the bonds that define my friendships and family. This project is a deeper exploration of that inquiry, inspired by the playful chaos and palpable love of my family gatherings. In diving into this project, my goal is to convey the feeling of overwhelming chaos and loving invitation that is embedded in these fond memories of my family by creating a chaotic composition steeped in a warm color palette with a focus on the physicality of care.

Interaction, especially when it comes to the chaotic and loving manner of interaction which my family specializes in, comes down to gestures. Particularly in the case of hand gestures, they communicate not just emotion, but also relationships and unspoken dynamics. Thinking about these gestures, I found myself looking to artists like Karl Haendel, whose work focuses on the impossibility of gestures and hands as symbols of identity. In trying to convey the sense of the warmth within the chaos of a family gathering, my mind kept turning to the way those interactions are layered and nuanced and steeped in love while simultaneously jabbing you just hard enough in the ribs to make you jump. In Danie Cansino’s series Flesh and Bones, those moments are framed by textiles which hold significance for the scenes depicted. For my family, the heart of this chaotic swirl of energy centers around food. It is not only a way to show care, but also what holds us together. There is culture and history baked into each dish and there is something deeply comforting in the way the question “have you eaten yet?” is asked so forcefully that you can’t refuse the plate of food which will inevitably appear before you despite your answer.

In order to capture both the essence of this feeling and atmosphere of warm insanity, I chose to focus on those hand gestures and the communal identity that forms from the combination of all those interactions happening at once. The food becomes a vessel for movement and a means for showing care, while each individual is wrapped up in the motion of a collective meal. Because this scene is filtered through my own memory, it is interpreted through my perspective which is inherently subjective and infused with feeling. Hands jut out from different angles, all overlapping and interacting with each other and the food in a way that, though physically impossible, is exactly how I remember these meals. The altered color palette serves to invoke not only the feeling of warmth and love, but also to provide each hand, each member of my family, with their own unique essence despite the lack of identifying features. The food is decadent and infused with the care put into its creation. Some hands exist as static moments, while others are caught in blurry motion to further the tension between reality and perception so that the scene becomes truly disorienting and impossible.

In sharing this unique experience of loving and welcoming chaos, I hope to invite each viewer to understand my perspective on family as a site of simultaneous chaos and comfort and to feel that love and familiarity in the scene. The overlapping hands create a sense of movement to activate the multigenerational interaction and collective experience. The viewer becomes enveloped in the scene, experiencing this interaction from my unique perspective filtered through a lens of subjective memory.