Mourning a Love that Doesn’t Exist

2024

My ongoing series, Mourning a Love that Doesn’t Exist, embodies unfulfilled devotion and longing that parallels across cultural and personal histories. Using charcoal on paper, I allow myself to move my hands without overthinking. Each mark is made through intuition and impulse, a return to self as I listen to my gut and heart. Charcoal allows me to form a range of emotions, an ongoing heartbreak, a constant sacrifice for others in the hope they might feel loved. I’ve been giving to others what has never been able to reach me, by loving them in ways I wanted them to love me.

In these pieces, I revisit my own boundaries, or lack of them, revealing the spaces where I have bled in silence, longing for acknowledgment and recognition of my wounds. Both the medium and the work feel raw.

These works reflect the difficulties of love in colonized spaces. In lands shaped by systemic forces, love has become hardened, more distant. This absence has shaped my idea of what love looks like, embedding a yearning that feels eternal. The series speaks to my experiences of love as a form of exile, of yearning to be loved by someone or something that never truly existed. As an immigrant, and child of immigrants, I am bound to my heritage and culture, yet still separated, always longing to return to a land that feels out of reach, unable to go back. I mourn ideas, dreams, goals and ambitions that might never manifest due to my documentation in this country. I mourn places and memories I will never see, never smell, never breathe. I yearn to be loved and protected by those who are supposed to love me, but shaped by the horrors before them, they do not know how. I am mourning them while they are still alive. I am mourning my future while I still exist.

Each piece explores what it means to yearn for a love that remains intangible. I want to be loved softly and out loud so badly that I indulge in making all my work about love. And sometimes, when I realize it’s not happening, no matter how many layers I pull back to understand it, it makes my body physically sick. Not knowing what love feels like but knowing it exists reminds me of when I read about those born blind who assume the sun must make noise due to its visible vibration. I want to reach out and touch it so badly, but it has never been tangible for me, and I don’t want to stop reaching for it, but it seems to always escape me.