Gods and Monsters, 2021

2021 | Installation of 63 works on paper with found bullet casings
Medium: Paper – Water – Pigment
Domain: Violence – Death – Mourning

Gods & Monsters is an installation of 63 watercolour, ink, and pastel drawings—vivid, visceral heads suspended in emotional flux—presented alongside empty bullet casings. The work is an elegy and an indictment, a mourning ritual for the lives touched and erased by violence, particularly the insidious silence of domestic violence.

Each head is a witness, a fragment of pain, a flash of divinity or monstrosity—uncertain where one ends and the other begins. Colour bleeds and resists, echoing the chaos of emotion that cannot be neatly contained. The heads, like voices once silenced, surface in a crowd of haunted presence.

The installation draws on poetic and philosophical reflections—Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking—to explore grief not as an isolated event, but as an ongoing, unspoken undercurrent. Grief happens. Mourning requires attention. These works demand it.

Triggered by the relentless facts of gun violence and personal experiences of domestic silence, Gods & Monsters is not simply about death, but the fragile return to breath, space, and articulation. It is a search for language after numbness—a confrontation with what we survive, and what survives in us.