Pressed flowers, flashe, coloured pencil, spray paint on raw canvas.48x48"Offbeat 48 "x 48" (part of the Mess Collection 2024) "She threw a funeral for her past life and invited her Old Self as the guest of honour. She decorated the walls with the whispers, the moans, the screams, the pleas for peace that sat with her night after night. She thanked her loneliness for keeping her company on the worst nights. Her grief is sacred, it reminds her she’s lucky to have felt it all, in all its imperfect perfection, in all its miserable beauty." The Mess Collection features a visual mapping of emotions, specifically the celebration of joy, surrender and peace that results from having endured the grieving process as depicted through abstract expressionism and florals. Abstracted flower imagery along with the use of real pressed botanicals from the artist’s garden can be seen throughout this series as LaCaria explores the paradoxical symbolism behind flowers and how they’re exchanged at both time of celebration and mourning. The floral elements draw parallels between the impermanence of seasons and life chapters, the ebb and flow of time and the ephemerality of emotions. The artist aims to evoke a nostalgia in the viewer by prompting the recrecollection of a memory in which flowers were present, for better or for worse. LaCaria uses bold swatches of colour reminiscent of bouquets and garden beds along with heavy line work symbolic of the written words of eulogies, lost conversations and past self-talk. These expressive elements come together to communicate a visual mapping of the emotional cycles that accompany grief as one moves forward into a state of joy by paying respect to the past self that was left behind. The resulting collection as a whole features compositions that embody a sense of ascension and levity as emotions appear to lighten and soften towards the upper parts of the canvas; or feature focal points of nothingness through the use of heavy negative space - an intentional commentary on the revelation that comes from the process of surrender, acceptance and the rebirth of the Self.
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