Longing

35″ x 39″,  scrap textiles and acrylic on raw canvas, hung like a banner from a dowel.

This piece will be on display and available to purchase at Women’s Voices, March 28- April 11 2026; at a juried exhibition at the Women’s Art Association of Canada, 23 Prince Arthur Avenue, Toronto, Ontario M5R 1B2

This piece depicts an older woman suspended between present reality and remembered youth. Ravens bracket the composition, acting as witnesses and thresholds between temporal states. Across cultures, ravens are associated with intelligence, memory, and liminality; they occupy the charged space between life and death, past and present. Here, they function not as omens but as carriers of thought and remembrance—embodied consciousness holding experience in tension. They observe both the stillness of age and the vitality of youth, suggesting continuity rather than rupture.

On one side, the figure occupies her current moment—marked by gravity and reflection. On the other, fragments of her younger self emerge through memory: gestures, posture, and momentum articulated through shifts in colour, density, and textile rhythm. The woman running out of (or into? ) the forest and the stag emerging at its border operate as compounding symbols of instinct, vitality, and untamed possibility.

The mountain lion introduces a parallel symbolic register. Often associated with solitude, strength, and embodied power, the mountain lion represents self-possession and latent force. Unlike the raven, which witnesses from above, the lion occupies the terrain—muscular, grounded, and alert. Its presence suggests that vitality is not extinguished by age but transformed. It embodies a mature form of power: controlled, interior, and watchful rather than overtly kinetic. In this way, the animal becomes a counterpoint to nostalgia, redirecting the narrative from loss toward endurance and agency.

Within the context of women’s creative production, I situate this work in dialogue with forms of labour historically coded as domestic or peripheral. Appliqué—layering one fragment onto another—mirrors the way identity accrues over time. The exclusive use of worn textiles reinforces the conceptual core of the piece: memory as material residue. These fabrics once lived other lives; they carry traces of touch, use, and wear. Their reuse parallels the body’s own accumulation of experience.

By working only with discarded cloth, I foreground repair and reconstitution as acts of agency. The older woman’s longing is not framed as diminishment, but as evidence of endurance—of a life layered, weathered, and held together.

Through accumulation, structural repetition, and the quiet insistence of salvaged material, the work speaks to continuity across time. Ravens as witnesses and the mountain lion as embodied strength anchor the composition in a field of resilience. The piece ultimately offers a meditation on identity as something constructed, remembered, and sustained—stitched from what remains.