Memoirs
16” x 20” | Graphite on Paper, Magazine Collage
MGMcedes Designs © 2021
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TRIGGER WARNING: To those who are sensitive to the topics of suicide and self harm.
As reluctant as I am to write this, I promised that my vulnerability would set the example needed to connect us all on more meaningful and intimate levels.
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A lot can happen to a person within a year - physically, mentally, emotionally… and I can both reluctantly and proudly say that I went through it; I still am. This project was one of the only few I had accomplished in the year of 2021. That year, last year, was a slow year for me.
If you stalk me on social media, you’ve seen that this piece had taken some time for me to work through. I had started it for the second time in May and it wasn’t completed until late September. I was very reluctant to start over, for fear of disproportionally misplacing the skeleton again, but it was either go big or go home.
This piece represents my love for raccoons in general and at the same time, the ever persistent thoughts of death that graciously crosses my mind. Death, not in the sense of suicide (anymore), but rather, the sentiment that comes and goes with it.
After the raccoon was completed, it came time to cut and paste. I arranged the floral decor and skeleton within a frame carefully selected to help me commemorate death, resurrection, the beauty within life, the memories made, and the transitional process from each moment to the next.
I then searched for a tattooist to help me commemorate my work on me. I appreciate tattoos because it’s work that I can always carry with me, no matter whose work it is. Not many will understand the reasoning for getting a body modification (such as cutting your skin to insert pigment underneath), but I want to briefly give you mine.
This piece, in addition to all my other tattoos, are to me, a form of self expression done in a positive productive way. Before I used to cut into my skin with the intentions of destroying the temple; now I cut into my skin with the intentions of never destroying the artwork, therefore protecting the temple.
“Memoirs” is part of a physical manifestation of my thought processes, my experiences, and emotions tied to the theme for the exhibition in which it was created for. To capture a moment or memories in an artwork, like a photograph, is to remember how fragile life can be.
