| Canada Dreams |
All at Sea
is a pastel of a Tibetan girl in a refugee camp. I started to work on this pastel thinking the subject reminded me of a male Buddhist friend from
the past, which she still does. I then realized that I also see myself in this picture, leaning over the
railing of the Mauritania, when I was three. I felt so distant and cut off, then; it was a time of forced
separation from my father when my mother took me to Wales to be baptized and stayed there a
year. I am drawn to the hands of the child whose hands, shaped like a Buddhist prayer sign, seem to
be holding an atomic mushroom cloud. Hands are an important image in my work; they manifest
my power as an artist and creator. The feeling I was left with was one of a child being "all at sea."   |
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