"Handle With Care"
Artist Reflection

When I made this piece in 2026, I wanted to put two worlds in one frame and see if they could hold each other.

At the top, I painted a mother and child in pale, stone-like tones. For me, that's Madonna and Child — not in a church way, but in a human way. Timeless. Quiet. I placed them against green foliage because I needed life around them. Pothos, vines, things that keep growing even when no one is looking. I let a soft light fall from the top left because that’s how love feels to me: not loud, just there, covering.

Then I did something that felt wrong at first. I brought in bubble wrap.
I stamped it along the sides like pillars, so the figures would feel framed by something modern, something ordinary. And in the lower half, I let it take over completely — a hard line cut the canvas, and below it I poured reds, oranges, pinks. Heat. Noise. The world down here.
In the middle of that fire I placed a circle, a small globe with a heart-shaped cluster inside it. That’s the fragile part. That’s us.

For me, bubble wrap is not trash. It’s care. It’s what we use to protect things that can break. So I asked myself: what if I use it to talk about love?
The mother above protects the child the same way we wrap something fragile before sending it out into the world. The lower half is everything chaotic and passionate and breakable — the earth, the heart, the mess. But it’s held. It’s anchored by the calm above it.

I signed it in the bottom right because I needed to claim it. This is 2026, and I’m tired of pretending the sacred has to look old. Sometimes the sacred looks like packaging material. Sometimes it looks like a mother breathing in a room full of green.

When people look at it, I hope they don’t just see texture. I hope they ask themselves the same question I was asking while I made it:
What am I protecting? And what has been protecting me all along?