Karen's Painting

Acrylic and mixed media (paper) on wood.

36x36x1"

Karen's Painting uses archival letters from my granduncle Herbert A. Pritchard to explore the intimate costs of migration; the letters he wrote to my grandmother for peace of mind while serving in the British Royal Air Force during and after World War II, documenting his life as a Jamaican immigrant in 1950s England. It's part of my 2024 series, Seekers and Imprints, where I'm tracing my family's migrations from the Caribbean to Britain and Canada, and the acts of care that held us together across distance and displacement. I made this with acrylic paint and mixed media using archival family letters from the 1950s, asking: What forces us to migrate? When migration is shaped by war, by necessity, by circumstances beyond our control, what is the psychological cost? What does it mean to be displaced not by choice but by circumstance? How do we hold onto ourselves when we're far from home, far from who we were?