Remembrance: Attachment: Violence Circle, First Step

Violence Circle, First Step Acrylic on silk, 30 × 55 cm, 2023

Part of my Remembrance: Love and Grief series.

This painting is based on a photograph of a former friend who subjected me to violence. Part of his wife's portrait also appears in the image. They are both smiling, an ordinary gesture that becomes unsettling when seen through the memory of what happened.

I painted this photograph years after ending my relationship with them. The distance of time allowed me to return to the image from another position—not as someone still caught within the relationship, but as someone looking back at what had happened.

The fragmented composition and layered silk surface transform the photograph into a space where memory, violence, and emotional attachment intersect. The smiling faces remain suspended between what the photograph records and what it cannot reveal.

Violence Circle, First Step is about the beginning of a cycle: how violence can exist beneath the surface of seemingly ordinary relationships, and how remembering can become a way of recognizing, naming, and reclaiming what was once difficult to see.