"Death, Grief, and Faery: Banshee" 30"x22" ink on paper 

Part of a series surrounding my grief over my mother's death in 2020 (of cancer.)  In it, I address my processing of this loss by drawing her spirit, Fae creatures, and myself interacting in various ways.  

The banshee is perhaps the most obvious faerie to link to my mother’s death.  While this piece is deeply personal to me, representing a sort of half-dream as I slept fitfully on my mother’s couch the night she finally died, I meant also to place that event firmly in the context of the pandemic. When she died, in mid-November, death was everywhere. It stalked me, too, and everyone I loved. I put the mask on the banshee to allude to this greater context. I had her famed keening/screaming annunciation of death also in mind, with the art depicting her visiting me overnight to announce my mom’s passing- but I wanted to play loosely with the concept of there being such a staggering death toll that she can’t even scream properly. Skeletons were also also included to allude to the bizarre feeling of something so huge and painful to me also being, in that greater context, a sort of drop in the bucket, something statistically insignificant.