The Care We Carry

An evolving portrait series | 2024–present

The Care We Carry is an evolving body of portrait-based work that explores care as something inherited, embodied, and passed between generations. Through charcoal, paint, fabric, and quilting, I create portraits on handmade quilts that consider the emotional, physical, and spiritual labor of caring for ourselves and others.

The series began with a portrait of myself while pregnant, created four months after giving birth to my son. At the time, I was navigating the profound physical and emotional changes of new motherhood while learning how to care for myself within the demands of caring for someone else. Painting that image became an act of recognition, a way of saying, I see you. I honor what you are carrying.

As the work has evolved, it has become increasingly rooted in my relationship with my grandmother and the generations of women who shaped my understanding of love, care, and making. My grandmother introduced me to sewing and quilting at a young age, teaching me skills that now serve as both material and metaphor within this body of work. The handmade quilt becomes a site of memory, protection, intimacy, and connection, a surface that holds both the image and the stories carried within it.

Each portrait reflects on the ways care is practiced through presence, tenderness, sacrifice, rest, resilience, and love. By placing these figures within quilts I construct by hand, I consider how care can be woven into our bodies, our relationships, and the traditions we inherit.

The Care We Carry is an ongoing meditation on motherhood, family, memory, and the enduring ways we hold one another. It asks: What do we carry for those we love? What has been passed down to us? And how do we learn to care for ourselves while caring for others?

To deepen my understanding of each subject’s relationship to care, I invite participants to complete a reflective questionnaire. Their responses offer insight into how they give, receive, experience, and define care in their own lives. These personal reflections inform the emotional tone, symbolism, composition, and visual language of each portrait, allowing every work to remain grounded in the subject’s lived experience. The questionnaire also creates space for trust and connection, transforming the portrait-making process into a collaborative act of listening, witnessing, and honoring.