Anon 001
Participatory Portrait
She was
a mess
People saw the addiction, the mistakes, the reactions and the messiness. They didn’t always see the little girl underneath it.
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She grew up learning that love and fear could exist in the same place. She experienced violence and abandonment, carried responsibilities no child should have had to carry, and eventually entered the care system.
Still incredibly young, she found herself largely navigating adulthood alone. By eighteen, she was struggling with cocaine addiction and chasing attention and validation wherever she could find it.
But she wasn’t chasing attention because she was shallow. She was chasing connection because she was starving for it. She wanted to feel chosen. Wanted. Important. Seen.
People could look at the resulting chaos and see a mess. They couldn’t see everything that had made it.
Today, she is building a life that feels peaceful and intentional. Despite everything that could have made her hard, she has deliberately chosen softness. She wants to bring light to other people because she remembers the people who brought light into her darkest moments.
She was a mess. But that was never the whole story.
THE DESTRUCTION
Half in Love, Half in Fear
About the Work
2026
Acrylic on canvas
She described growing up “half in love and half in fear,” so I physically divided the portrait, taping across it and casting half of her face into shadow.
I mottled and blotched the surface with messy, bruise-like marks, reflecting both the violence of her childhood and the mess people later saw in her life. Finally, I flicked white paint across the portrait, particularly around her nose, referencing the cocaine addiction that became another visible part of that mess.
The portrait deliberately holds all of those things at once: love and fear, violence and addiction, darkness and softness. The mess is visible — but so is the woman underneath it.