Intentional Solitude

Acrylic, book pages, silver leaf

While the pandemic forced us away from close human contact for over a year, the solitude forced us to peel back the layers of our personas to see the rawer, most primal version of ourselves, and be one with that self. In my work, I use old book pages as the basis for layered, multivalent paintings that reveal the subjectivity of both image and text when they’re taken out of their original contexts and layered together. The pages used here came from "Women who run with the wolves" by Dr. Clarissa Picoa Estes. According to Estes, the word "Alone" has traditionally been treated as two words, All one, and to be wholly one. Solitude is not an absence of energy or action, but rather an influx of wild provisions transmitted from the soul. The silver lining of solitude allowed us to tend to the corners of ourselves that were previously ignored.