Artist's Notes: The Tethered Heart Series

There are experiences that change the architecture of a life.

Years of navigating a child's profound suffering — trauma, mental illness, self-harm, the fear that never fully leaves — is one of them.

Much has been written about the person who is struggling and rightly so. Their suffering is real and deserving of compassion. But less often do we speak about the people who love them. The mothers, fathers, siblings and friends whose lives become shaped by the uncertainty that follows in the wake of crisis.

This series emerged from that place.

Not from a single event, but from years of navigating fear, hope, disappointment, resilience, and the exhausting cycle of believing that things might finally improve only to be reminded that they may not.

Over time, I became aware of a tension that existed within me. A constant negotiation between protecting my heart and keeping it open. When someone you love is repeatedly harmed by circumstances, choices or illness, there is a natural impulse to retreat. To build distance. To harden.

Yet motherhood rarely allows such clean separations. The heart remains strongly tethered.

The title of this series emerged from that understanding. Not as a statement of weakness, dependence or failure, but as an adaptation and an acknowledgement of the enduring connection. A recognition that love continues to exist even when certainty disappears.

The work There Was a Place in Her Heart That Never Hardened reflects this idea directly. Constructed through countless small stitches and knots and layers of randomly woven felted wool, the piece considers the quiet resilience required to remain open in the face of repeated emotional injury. It is not a work about innocence or optimism. Rather, it speaks to the conscious decision to preserve tenderness when hardness might seem easier.

The second work, The Conversation Kept Unfolding, extends this story beyond the individual self.

Throughout this period, one of the most significant sources of strength in my life came from the women around me. Friends who listened without judgement. Friends who understood that some problems cannot be solved and that presence itself is the best medicine.

The work draws inspiration from those conversations. The long, winding exchanges that begin in one place and travel through memory, experience, practical wisdom, grief, humour and hope before arriving somewhere unexpectedly different but no less important. Conversations in which the scaffolding of support is built collectively rather than delivered as advice.

The branching forms within the work reflect this process. Ideas emerge, diverge and reconnect. Meaning accumulates slowly. Nothing exists in isolation.

Together these two works form a meditation on endurance. One considers the effort required to remain emotionally open. The other acknowledges the relationships that make such openness possible.

At a time when much of the world encourages independence and self-sufficiency, these works suggest a different truth. That survival is often relational. That we are sustained by connection. That tenderness can be a form of strength.

Most of all they recognise the women who quietly carry one another through life's most difficult seasons.

The conversations.

The listening.

The understanding.

The invisible threads that hold us together when everything else feels like it's falling apart.