Fragments Carried Forward
Mixed Media — Acrylic, Stitching, Archival Paper, 2025
Fragments Carried Forward is a mixed-media exploration of memory, inheritance, and quiet repair. This piece reflects on how generational trauma and resilience shape identity, using layered materials to reveal what is carried, concealed, or slowly pieced back together.
Shadowed figures, archival maps, and stitched elements create a visual language of fragmentation echoing the way personal and familial histories often arrive incomplete. Text becomes both trace and interruption, hinting at stories that are felt more than spoken.
The act of stitching throughout the work symbolizes care, labor, and the ongoing effort to mend what has been fractured. Although the materials appear fragile, they also embody endurance: the ability to hold pain and strength at the same time.
Fragments Carried Forward becomes a quiet gesture of remembrance and repair an emotional tribute to the experiences that echo across generations and shape who we become.
Staining with Memory
I began by priming the canvas with watered-down Burnt Sienna acrylic, building up translucent layers to evoke age, memory, and a sense of historical depth. Drips streaked down the surface, symbolizing blood, sweat, and tears marks of sacrifice, struggle, and emotional labor carried across generations. In the top right corner, I hand-embroidered a flower bouquet and leaf as small acts of softness and care symbols of life, remembrance, and growth amidst pain.
Letters to the Past
Throughout the work, I embedded original poems and letters, each intentionally placed on textured surfaces maps, handmade paper, silhouettes to echo the layered nature of memory and identity. These writings act as quiet but persistent voices within the piece, often faint, fragmented, or partially hidden, just like generational trauma and emotional inheritance.
The poems reflect the internal landscapes of women mapped by grief, stitched by survival, and rewritten by reclamation. They speak in the language of bruises, red thread, and soil; they unfold silences and give shape to sacred wounds. Each line is both personal and collective: a dialogue between my voice and those of women who came before me, imagined or remembered.
Letters addressed to the self, to unknown ancestors, and to broken bodies serve as emotional landmarks within the work. They assert agency (“I claim the pen now”) while honoring those who stitched beauty while bleeding.
Stitching Language into Wounds
Throughout the piece, I hand-stitched the words hidden, broken, silences, and mended, along with a small stitched heart each element carrying emotional weight and intentional placement. These stitches are not decorative; they are acts of confrontation, care, and remembrance. To stitch is to slow down, to sit with pain, and to physically mark its presence and its transformation.
Hidden speaks to the stories kept beneath the surface buried by shame, silence, or survival. It represents what is protected yet aching to be seen.
Broken symbolizes fragmentation of identity, lineage, memory, and belonging. It confronts generational rupture and the damage passed down through silence or trauma.
Silences honors the things left unsaid: the emotional voids inherited across generations, particularly among women who learned to endure without explanation.
Mended offers a gesture of hope not erasure of damage, but visible healing. It acknowledges the quiet, persistent effort to repair what once seemed irreparable.
The stitched heart sits as both wound and offering. It represents the emotional core of the piece the vulnerability beneath every thread. Not perfect, but held together, the heart becomes a symbol of resilience, love, and the ability to keep going despite fracture.
Together, these stitched elements act as tactile language. They turn pain into presence, silence into story, and repair into ritual. With every loop of thread, the canvas becomes a body marked, remembered, and slowly made whole again.