Flower Garden began in 2018 during my MFA, inspired by my grandmother’s garden and the quiet, complicated beauty of caring for someone you love.During the final six months of my grandmother’s life, I became her full-time caregiver.
As I watched her garden continue to grow through a season of profound change, flowers became more than something beautiful—they became a language for memory, loss, resilience, and love.This series is my meditation on those things: what we nurture, what we lose, and what continues to bloom.
Scroll for artworks in this series. Click here for the full story behind my Flower Garden series.
Flower Garden began in 2018 during my MFA, inspired by my grandmother’s garden and the quiet, enduring beauty I found there.
For the final six months of my grandmother’s life, I became her full-time caregiver. She was in her eighties and had cancer, but she chose not to pursue treatment. She did not want her remaining time defined by the suffering of chemotherapy. Caring for her was exhausting, intimate, heartbreaking, and deeply meaningful. It was also a privilege. In the midst of uncertainty and loss, I found myself paying closer attention to the small things—the flowers, the changing seasons, the rhythms of nature, and the beauty that exists even when we know something is coming to an end.
Her garden became a place where life and death existed together.
Flowers bloom, wither, return, and bloom again. Their beauty is temporary, yet the garden continues. Seeds become roots, roots become flowers, and what appears to be an ending is often part of another beginning. I began to understand the garden as a reflection of the human experience: we grow, we love, we lose, we grieve, and somehow, eventually, we find a way to grow again.
In 2021, I unexpectedly lost my little brother. His death changed everything. I stopped creating. For three and a half years, I had no desire to make art. My creative practice gave way to grief, to caring for myself, and to being present for my mother as she experienced the loss of her son. There was no forcing my way through it. I simply had to live through it.
When I finally felt the desire to create again, I returned to Flower Garden.
Revisiting this series has become part of my own process of healing. The paintings are no longer only about my grandmother’s garden. They now carry the weight of everything that has happened since I first began them—the love of my grandmother, the experience of caring for her, the devastating loss of my brother, the grief shared with my mother, and the long, difficult journey of finding my way back to myself.
I am revising the series not to recreate what it was, but to allow it to become what it is now.
Through color, movement, layering, and the imperfect process of painting, I explore grief as something that cannot simply be overcome, but must be carried, transformed, and integrated into who we become. The process itself is meditative and cathartic. Each mark becomes a way of processing emotion; each layer holds a memory, a question, a moment of pain, or a glimpse of joy.
Flower Garden is ultimately a meditation on the natural cycle of life and death, and on the possibility of beauty within both.
It is about grief, but it is also about growth.
It is about loss, but also about love.
It is about endings, but also about the quiet beginnings that follow.
The garden reminds me that nothing in nature remains unchanged. Flowers do not bloom forever, but their temporary beauty does not make them less beautiful. Perhaps it makes them more so.
These paintings are my attempt to honor that truth—to acknowledge what has been lost, to hold space for what still hurts, and to make room for what is beginning to grow again.
Flower Garden is not a return to who I was.
It is evidence that, after everything, I am still growing.