Critical Reflection
Introduction
This unit has been a continuation and deepening of where I left off in Unit 1, where I started to engage with my inner child through art. That which began as literal self-portraits and nostalgic materials has transformed into a symbolically charged, layered, and emotionally rich practice. I remain interested in childhood, healing, and emotional memory, but how I approach and engage with them has changed. My practice has expanded, both in idea and material, from representing childhood to embodying its essence.
One of the significant influence in this term is my personal experience with Family Constellation Therapy, which is a method of examining how emotional patterns within families may influence our lives today. This encouraged me to think about the way I perceive memory and materials. I began incorporating thread and stitched elements to symbolize the invisible connection between the members of families and started expanding the way I make artworks instead of merely drawing myself as a kid.
That being said, I made my work more spontaneous, abstract, and playful. Reaching for materials like oil pastels, creating my own stencils, using glitter paper, and stitching colorful beads. These gestures are not random, they’re intentional tools for reconnecting and healing. In one exploration, I explored photography through sticker covered self portraits stuck on my face. It was a way of becoming the figure I often paint, reclaiming that child in real time- through my adult body.
In this unit, I started to discover that healing may not always be direct- just as memory isn’t always chronological or clear. Sometimes healing shows up in threads, in glitter, in pastel marks and stitched stars. In this reflection, I reveal the different ways my practice has deepened, expanded, and opened new emotional ground. What follows is a journey through the materials, methods, memories, and meanings that have influenced my work and the quiet, playful, sometimes painful truths that surface as I listen to the voice of my inner child.
Weekdays and Weekends
20 x 20 cm
Acrylic, oil pastel, thread & stitched sequins on canvas
Chapter 1 - Split Homes, One Thread
My artwork Weekdays and Weekends started with a childhood memory, staying at my dad’s house during the week and at my mom’s house on weekends. That routine somehow shaped a part of my emotional childhood experience, always being in transit between houses, figuring out how to feel like I fit in both. My artwork shows two gently stitched houses, one belonging to each parent, joined by pink threads. Above it, small beaded stars float like symbolic family members- distant but always somehow present.
​
This piece was inspired by my personal experience with Family Constellation Therapy, an approach to therapy created by Bert Hellinger exploring the ways in which unresolved family emotional dynamics and trauma move unconsciously from one generation to the next. In the therapy, the arrangement of family members is used to reveal unconscious emotional patterns- and that stuck with me: we are all positioned in systems of memory, even if we are not aware of it (Hellinger, 2001).
​
In Weekdays and Weekends, the thread is a silent metaphor for connection, distance, and duration. It maps the invisible traces of loyalty, loss, and love that persist to influence me in my adulthood. I came to feel the stitched houses and beads as not merely surface decoration, but carriers of memory and inherited emotions, embroidered tenderly into surface.
Reading Mark Wolynn's It Didn’t Start With You made me better understand this. He explains, "Unconsciously, we relive the pain of our parents, our grandparents, and even our far-distant ancestors" (Wolynn, 2016, p. 23). His book made me see that these emotional memories live in the body and that sewing them into my artworks became a form of acknowledgment and transmutation. Rather than letting those stories remain unspoken, I started to thread them into shape.
​
The artwork has a soft visual language to it - pastel tones, small stars, soft lines- but its emotional weight is intentional. It is about the separation, yes , but also about the bonds that did not break, even across different houses. The kid in the painting is not seen, but she is felt in each choice, in the connection of the things, in the space in between.
The Playground is Quiet Now
21 x 29.7 cm
Acrylic and stitched beads on canvas
Chapter 2 - Play Is The Language
I let myself embrace play more fully in Unit 2, not only as material process, but as process of mind. Painting became more freer, looser and less about depicting childhood, and more about channeling it through intuition and materials. I still continued to reach for oil pastels, attracted to the crayon-like texture and the physical and emotional connection they provided me to making art as a child. Its directness, soft, messy, bold spirit encouraged me to release control.
​
A great transition in my practice was from literal to abstract and symbolic representational forms. An example is The Playground is Quiet Now, which has as its surface a tender color field created by using a pony-shaped stencil -a toy from childhood. Across it, I stitched blue beads in the shape of tears. Placing one by one became meditative, each one a quiet emotion. The piece became a visual elegy to childhood, to what’s lost and what still remains. It is about mourning childhood, but doing it softly, through texture and color.
​
These are inspired in part by Paul Klee, whose playful philosophy and radically abstract language encouraged me to tap into my intuitive nature. In his Pedagogical Sketchbook, Klee famously writes about drawing as "a line [that] is a dot that went for a walk" (Klee, 1925, p. 16). This feeling of curiosity, movement, and spontaneity encouraged me to release the need to explain and instead, to play.
​
I was using stencils again expressly, no longer merely as formal tools, but as one returns to a childhood tool. As children, we employ stencils when we do not trust our own drawing skills. By working with them now, I’m not trying to hide my skills, I am reclaiming the playful structure. In some works recently made, teddy bear and pony shapes ghost across the canvas, not always at the centers of the works, but repeated as recurring symbols, like memories in fading light.
​
As I practice, play is not decoration for myself, nor is it escape, it is access. It opens the door to emotions I don't even know how to put into words, to moments I've long forgotten, to aspects of myself I'm still searching to come to know. Play, in all this, is emotional uncovering. It reveals the invisible.
Chapter 3- Embodying The Image
I have been experimenting with photography as the next part of my practice. I took a series of self-portraits with stickers on my face, using the same kinds of stickers I often use in my paintings - the stars, hearts, bold shapes. These photos weren’t fancy or staged. They were quiet, personal moments of play. Putting the stickers on my skin became a kind of ritual. Slowly and carefully, I started to turn into the figure I’ve been painting for the past couple of months, not just in a symbolic way, but for real.
​
At that moment, I felt like I was becoming the inner child, not just showing her. It wasn’t just about looking like a kid, it was about stepping into how she might feel. This made me see how closely being in the body is connected to healing. It reminded me that play isn’t only a memory, it’s something the body still knows how to do, even as an adult.
​
This links directly to the idea of embodied memory, the idea that emotional memories are stored in the body, not just in the mind. In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk (2014) explains how trauma lives in our muscles, posture, voice, and movements. Healing, then, sometimes needs more than words or thoughts, it needs action, ritual, and sensory experience. Putting stickers on my face, something that might seem small or childish, was actually a quiet, physical way to reconnect with parts of myself that words couldn’t reach.
Photography let me capture something painting couldn’t: the feeling of being both the child and the adult. In these photos, I’m playful and still. I’m decorated but also open. My look into the camera shows uncertainty, curiosity, and a quiet kind of sadness and maybe even passiveness. I’m not smiling. I’m not performing. I’m just there, present. These images aren’t separate from my paintings; they speak the same emotional language. They help me explore what it feels like to be seen, not just to see.
​
This process reminded me of Yoshitomo Nara, whose characters are often sweet but strong, they look like children, but their emotions are layered and deep. Lately I have been feeling connected to his work, but through this approach, I began to understand it in a more personal way. Like Nara’s characters, I wanted to make space for mixed emotions: play and discomfort, innocence and rebellion, being here and longing for something more.
The act of becoming my inner child, instead of just painting her, helped my practice grow. It allowed me to step into the world I’ve been painting, and for the first time, to truly live inside it.
Chapter 4 - Witnessing Others
I recently had a trip to New York and visited MoMA, I encountered several works there that deeply resonated with some themes I've been exploring. Particularly ideas around childhood, memory, and emotional layering. Of course, standing in front of Mike Kelley's Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991/1999), I felt struck! It was as though I saw an actual manifestation of the emotional world that I've been working to build. The central, hovering mass of worn out stuffed animals surrounded by satellite units that were shiny and released a certain scent spoke to something central to my own work. That childhood is not easy or trouble-free, but complicated, layered, and sometimes overwhelming.
​
Nearby, I saw Adrian Piper's Self-Portrait at Age 5 with Doll (1966). This photo of a child — still, hard, and unblinking, it was deeply moving. It reminded me of my own childhood self-portraits, but also made me consider how identity, power, and vulnerability are written into our early years. Piper's inner strength showed me to look at my own inner child not as someone to protect, but as someone who is already strong.
​
Another experience that stuck with me was viewing David Wojnarowicz's Earth (1987). His bare, frank, spiritual, layered imagery and how they all blended together felt like it was a visual scream. It made me think about how far you can go with symbolic transmission and how far imagery can push when anger, loss, and grief are contained within. While my work is more soft in tone, I still walked away feeling braver at embracing conflicting feelings existing together.
Seeing these artists, alongside Rivera’s Cubist compositions and Piper’s soft assertion, reminded me that I’m not alone in these explorations. Art can be tender or defiant, loud or quiet, but when it comes from truth, it always lands.
Conclusion - Then And Now
This unit has been a clear evolution in both the why and the how I make. When I began, I was still trying to re-create childhood as I remembered it, through photographs, symbols, and literal representations. But as the work evolved, I found myself drifting away from depicting the inner child and into encountering her, listening to her, and allowing her presence to guide the work in the moment.
​
With more material investigation like stitching, thread, stencils, pastels, and photography, I found ways of making visible the invisible: grief , inherited emotions, yearning, and play. Studies in Family Constellation Therapy and books like The Body Keeps the Score led me to understand that art can hold memory in the body of the canvas, just as trauma is held in the body. This has deepened my belief in abstraction, repetition, and process.
​
I don't have to say it all in a painting anymore. I let the work carry its own emotional resonance, loud at times, quiet at others, always honest. And in doing so, I've learned that the inner child is not one I've lost. She's still here, still creating with me, still healing, one thread, one sticker, one line at a time.
References:
Hellinger, B. (2001) Acknowledging What Is: Conversations with Bert Hellinger. Phoenix, AZ: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen.
Wolynn, M. (2016) It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle. New York: Penguin Books.
Klee, P. (1925) Pedagogical Sketchbook. London: Faber & Faber.
van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking.