STATEMENT
On September 11th, 2022 I became a mother to a beautiful soul. My daughter was premature and in the 3 weeks of NICU visits and then months at home that followed, I began the wild ride of the postpartum experience: utter bliss, deep new love, anxiety and fear, the realization of my mortality, humor in little things, the challenges of breastfeeding. To feed my creative self at this busy and exhausting time, I wrote poems to try to capture the beauty and vastness of what I was feeling and experiencing. I’ve written poems for myself for at least twenty years. It was a familiar practice and has always helped me feel present.
When my daughter was around six and a half months old, my biological mother died unexpectedly. When she died, I was in the post-partum process of trying to put myself back together again, trying to remember who I was. Losing her shook my world tremendously. Her death made the light in my life brighter and the darkness deeper. I was livid at the universe and heavily uninspired until all of a sudden, about a month after she passed, I desperately felt the need to paint.
Painting was one of my first creative loves, and was also my Mother’s long-time artistic medium. And so I wandered back ‘home’ to a creative language I hadn’t spoken in quite some time, because it felt like being near her and also felt closer to my child self. I started to create works for her and for my daughter: a beautiful, safe world that my mother could reside in forever, that would help me tell her story to my children one day. The works have been a huge part of my grieving, healing and processing journey at this incredibly unique time where I have become a mother and have lost a mother simultaneously. A woman between two women who never got to meet; a circle that I am finding ways to close through imagery and memory.
The combination of these two huge life events has resulted in my feeling very natural and at home in intimate and personal conversation with people I know and don’t know. These paintings, while not all about grief or motherhood, help me stay in what feels like direct communication about what is real. While twelve years ago I painted my surrealist works with oil paints, I’ve painted these new pieces with natural inks. I’ve been cultivating and foraging pigment-producing plants for almost four years now, and have used them for making inks, dyeing fabric and fiber. And so, alongside my poems, these inks have taken on the role of illustrating this postpartum / postmortem space with their warmth, familiarity and elegance. I feel I have come to know them like close friends and I respect them deeply. These artworks are the effortless marriage between this material that I’ve come to love so deeply and the depths of my joy and sorrow at this time in my life.
About the artist
Brielle DuFlon (she/her) is a texture artist, weaver, natural dyer, and gardener. You can find her natural dye project / storytelling platform at www.santamente.com.
Brielle spent the first 18 years of her life in Antigua, Guatemala, and identifies as a Third Culture Kid. After moving from Guatemala to Charlottesville, VA to attend UVa, she graduated in 2010 and eventually settled in Charlottesville in 2012. These days, as she balances art and being a mother, she has a small studio at home. She has shown work in the United States and Guatemala, with her work finding its way into people’s homes in the U.S, Central America, Europe and Australia. When she’s not working on her art, she’s spending time with her incredible husband and daughter, family and friends, kitties and plants.
