The Altar of Forgiveness
30 x 40in, oil on canvas - 2023I’ll meet you at the Altar of forgiveness.
Hell and high water where he burned but my body held onto the memory. My body, the reliquary, the giving tree.
In memory of my sexual assault and the fire that claimed the perpetrator’s life, this work was created.
“Hell and high water where he burned and my body held onto the memory. My body, the reliquary, the giving tree.”
This painting is meant to coordinate symbols of the body in the face of destruction and the ever changing. The humanoid figures were created to visually overlap and hint at a shared space or body. My inspiration is the reliquary, the beholder of sacred artifacts wherein the body and the candelabra keep the fire and mirror each other.
There’s a balance I intended to portray between the all consuming fire that erased some aspect of my history and the purification I’m seeking out by sheltering my own light between my past and present self.
I have found parallels between this experience’s effect on my identity
and how I have come to define what it means to be African American while growing up. The severing of the frame as indicated by the semi-circle on the far left portion of the painting is the separation between the outer and inner world; personal experience against a history that cannot be afforded to me.
I chose warm tones for this painting to indicate the earth in which fire returns to potentially give way to new life. In this way, the altar of forgiveness exists.
So begins the emptiness just after finishing a long project. I spent the last two years being frustrated by my slow progress and slow inspiration but now I somehow need it back. I can’t explain it.