a Conversation
2020Two puppet-like figures kneel across from each other at a table, not in animated conversation, but in silent confrontation. Their exaggerated, expressive faces and oversized hands evoke a cartoonish vulnerability, a raw emotional honesty. Yet their hands are not free—they are nailed to the table. This gesture speaks to the inescapable bind of the situation: the desire to reach out, to speak, to hold on, but being pinned by reality. The table, once a site of connection, becomes a space of arrested communication.
The puppets are constructed from wood panels salvaged from the artist’s home, materials she attempted to use in renovation during the same period. These reclaimed fragments carry personal memory, domestic labor, and a sense of survival. Building the puppets from these remnants is a gesture of care and an effort to reconstruct something from what was breaking down.
Grief in this work is not loud—it is slow, splintered, and embodied. It acknowledges the disorientation of loving someone still physically present, but cognitively fading. At the same time, it holds space for a love that tries to endure—even when language, memory, and time collapse.
Visually, the figures reference the tradition of Italian theatre puppetry, where stylized forms and heightened expression are used to communicate states of moral, emotional, or existential conflict. Their theatrical stillness is emphasized through the surreal, frozen moment they inhabit, caught between intimacy and alienation.
It does not seek resolution. Instead, it offers a quiet but urgent reflection on the fragility of human connection—and the emotional weight held in what is unsaid, unseen, or slowly forgotten.