Deborah's Story

This piece is a way of exploring the nature of one of the most traditional mediums "oil on canvas" and pushing its boundaries. It is also a portrait of a specific woman in one time and place using. Deborah told me the story of visiting her extended (white) family in the Southern United States during vacation as a bi-racial woman. She experienced racism towards others of color in her own grandmother's home. She has always felt both pulled apart and stitched-together in her mixed identity. This piece is an abstraction of that identity with the underlying unified rawness beneath.