WE ARE STILL NOTHING

This work merges painting and sculpture into a single figure that is both mask and shrine. The human form emerges from a pastel-hued surface, yet it is not simply wearing a mask. It is the mask. Suspended above a floor of water, the being appears frozen mid-descent, caught in a moment between arrival and surrender. The surface is alive with beeswax blooms, polymer clay growths, and found objects that form a dense ecosystem. Paint takes on the look of bacteria and textiles, giving the figure a skin that feels like a petri dish. It is a shrine that carries hidden histories, memories, and layers of meaning, with more concealed than revealed. To the side hovers a dark void ringed in violet. Above its event horizon floats a butterfly my daughter gave to me. This fragile object rests above the pull of the black hole as if holding back collapse. The meeting of tenderness and destruction becomes a central tension. Materials were chosen for their symbolic resonance. Beeswax signals impermanence. Polymer clay reflects transformation. Found objects carry the imprint of their previous lives. At the core of the figure, a concentric opening reads as both wound and portal. The title points toward an understanding of nothingness as a fertile state. Here, absence is not loss. It is potential. The mask lives as much as the body beneath it. The figure becomes a threshold where change is always possible and where what can be seen is only part of what exists.