Chichy Obi

One For Sorrow, Two For Joy

I’m not sure if all my beautiful memories are truly happy, or if the uncomfortable ones are inherently ugly, but I know they’re mine. This project is a difficult yet necessary act of honesty, confronting memories around sexuality, trauma, menstruation, and self-hatred. I fear how many of my memories are heavy, the painful ones seem to carry a strange beauty that fascinates me and I forget whether it was actually painful.

For this body of work, I returned to watercolors, something I haven't really touched since before art school. Their delicacy, unpredictability, and transparency felt right for what I needed to say: that memory is layered, blurred, often tender, and impossible to fully control.

All the materials I used were found, gifted, or discarded, already carrying stories and histories of their own. That sense of re-use, of giving weight to the overlooked, mirrors the act of revisiting discarded parts of myself.

This spring, a pair of magpies nested outside my window. One for sorrow, two for joy. They became quiet witnesses to this process, guiding me through the emotional layers of my work, from light to dark, from shame to softness.