Death Of Ladybug Girl

Four artists, including me, an art historian, and a designer, were selected for the Stormwater 2024-25 Collaborative Residency. This was my first experience doing an artist-in-residency, never mind one that had a collaborative nature. I remember being incredibly nervous this time last year before the other residents and I met, but after our first Zoom call, I felt so relieved and excited to be working with a group of such talented and cool people.

For the next several months, the artists worked individually, making work to the theme “yearning for something that doesn’t exist” in their distinctive disciplines ranging from oil painting to experimental film. We found that we all went back to our childhoods and honed in on our perceptions of ourselves as children and what we remember from our experiences. Arguably, one of the hardest parts of this whole residency was choosing a title that encompassed all of our work. Jon came up with a very clever title, “And How Do You Remember It?” and we decided it was perfect, not only for our work but to invite the viewer in to analyze their memories as well.

I found myself coming back to my fourth birthday party. My mom had this epic setup in the backyard, and my friends and I dressed up as fairies. However, when I looked back at pictures from this event, I found that what I saw in photo albums didn’t quite match the image I had in my mind. This had me thinking: what if I embrace the fictitious quality of memory by writing a fictional story about my youth, starting from reality before dipping off into a journey down the tongue of time to her future — my present — A place where fairies become fae?

Unlike memories, I had something other than photos from my past that I could hold onto. When I was six or seven, I wrote in a journal about my dreams and an afterlife where I became a fairy after I died. This was how the younger version of me confronted the thought of aging and dying, and I find that I still yearn for this fairy afterlife and am consumed by the fact that I’ll never get there.

So this body of work that you see is the narrative sequence between my birthday, my pillow pet coming to life, going down the tongue of time, dealing with what she sees there, and being consumed by her past. At the end of the hall, I have recreated three pages from my original journal with my 19-year-old spin on it. This entire body of work is called “Death of Ladybug Girl,” with Ladybug Girl representing this children’s book character I associated myself with, and “Death” representing growing older.

These paintings are part of an ongoing project that I look to expand into a graphic novella in the coming years.