This project, done for an Ethics course, responds creatively to a worry doll I’ve kept since childhood, a small woven figure rooted in legend, meant to absorb your worries overnight. My mother gave it to me during a time of intense night terrors and anxiety. Since then, it has come to symbolize not just comfort, but self-soothing, maternal care, and emotional growth. It represents the layered contradictions I explore in my work: pain and peace, girlhood and womanhood, softness and power.

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In response, I painted from feeling rather than form. No sketches, just raw emotion and intuition. The process was be abstract, iterative, and deeply personal. Through this, I hoped to physically manifest my relationship with my inner child, my mother, and the contradictions of femininity. I wanted this work to move me first and foremost, to feel like a closure to something once left open. Woman and girlhood is in itself an iterative process, constantly changing and layering different forms and expressions. There is no finished product, and this is reflected through the rough and at times transparent collaging of different words, images, and identities. Women are not polished solids, but rather an amalgamation of each woman they have ever wanted to be, ever met in their lives. Journal entry excepts, quotes from books I was currently reading, and magazine clipping to reflect media I was consuming all coexist within a decorated container, ever evolving.