Hollow Memoriam Series

For her graduate series, Shirls created these oil paintings as a therapeutic process to work through her father’s abandonment during her adolescence. A stack of hidden family photos were rediscovered - photos of her family vacations throughout her childhood. The figures were unrecognizable to her as their smiles and poses presented a very different family than the one she was left with just a few years after. In painting these small scale paitings (4” x 6”), she filled in the figures only to remove them one by one. An act of replacing them with the hole this trauma has left her. This series represented a moment in her path to healing. It was not the start, and not the end. Healing takes time, patience, and willfulness.