After the success of the rabbit resin painting, I started to think about what I should include in the final, biggest piece. I knew I wanted to do the same process as the rabbit one, with resin coating it again. However, I thought about the aim of my project again. I wanted to convey the Happy-Sad days of childhood. There was always one incident that I always think about when I think of my childhood traumas. It was when my mother got sick slowly but surely, with a deathly pain running down her spine and arm, and whenever she moved it would force out the most inhumane wails of agony I have ever heard, and I have never felt so helpless. The tipping point, I think, was when I had to call an ambulance at a scary time of the night/morning because she could not bear the pain anymore. It was a somewhat frightening situation because we were in new zealand and even though I was born there the place had never felt so foreign when I talked to the nice lady on the phone and said, ‘My mother is in pain. She cannot move,” and neither could my 11-year old self. So when they came and carried her away I just stared at the ceiling besides my sleeping sister who was still an infant at the time. The memory of the whole incident was a flash but also a blur. The good thing is that my mother went back to Taiwan for treatment after the failure of the useless doctors in NZ. Even though she is safe now, I am still stuck in that fear nearly 10 years ago. You never know when it might struck again. Anyway, that’s how I feel about the experience, being an animal of taxidermy, in fear, in death, frozen in the traumatic time. I wanted to convey this situation in my big piece.
To do this, I decide to make more specific references to it by finally using text, which I’ve always wanted to use. (I’ve already did this on the block also, which was about the same incident) I also sketched out a spike near the top of the wolf’s spine to indicate that deathly Thing which triggered her nerves running down the arms that caused my mother so much pain. I sketched some more using animal imagery again and came up with these sketches, in the end deciding on the final drawing to be the plan of the piece. The text I want to include are.. ‘AMBULANCE’ ‘HURRY’ ‘DON’T MOVE’ ‘JUST STAY HERE’ and perhaps ‘HAPPY SAD HAPPY SAD’. I did write down ‘The demon dances across her spine. Wow! what a performance! It was born to dance,’ which is a reference to something I wrote right after the experience, but this may be too long. All I know is, I want to express this animal as being very, very much in pain. Its head is detached, there might be pills dropping out of its jaw, (the harsh and useless medication my mother desperately threw in her mouth) there would be grey elements, flashing pain, detached limbs, morphed animal parts, all floating in the strange inky space. That is my plan so far. I hope the final piece, encased with resin, will achieve the effect I want.
 |
| initial sketches |
 |
| image references |
 |
| after the resin coating |
