Exhibition work: "Sleeping on a Pile of Memories" by Kelly Tay in Jakarta

Mix media on canvas (oil paint & embroidery) Yet another one of my IB Visual Art work. I loved this work so much despite it being the most challenging and draining one to finish. To compliment my exhibition theme of Love and Loss, I knew I needed one big piece to represent grief as everyone says "the bigger the love, the bigger the grief". That statement is exactly what inspired me to make a piece larger than most of my other work that were also being exhibited. I never knew how I was going to make it but I had the vision in my mind and that's all i needed (or so i thought). I got the inspiration for this piece through my own grief which brought me to endless days staying in bed feeling drained both emotionally and physically. I feel that painting a woman lying helplessly on a bed wrapped up in messy sheets would portray grief as it also represents the pain of loss. I sketched out the figure of the woman with the teardrop on her face. The sketch that I made led me to another idea of making the details of the bed 3D to add textures and to make my work look more realistic. I then painted the figure with oil paint not forgetting to include dull shades of colors and even chose the color of beige-ish grey to follow the theme of dullness that I was trying to portray. I left out some parts of the canvas empty so that I could embroider the sheets easily without damaging the painted base. I pinned the sheet on the canvas following the guideline that I've hand-drawn as I realized how challenging my idea was to execute. If I embroidered the sheet wrong, I would ruin the whole shape and dimension of the painting. I was really careful and I stayed up all night (nothing new). Another thing that made this process of embroidery more challenging was how thick my canvas was which made it harder for me to pull the needle through while embroidering. Yet I persisted as I believe that this part would make my work even more beautiful than it already was without the 3D bed sheet. I finished this work one day before the exhibition and I was so relieved when I saw how well it turned out and how the extra touch of 3D sheets added the exact effect of realness to my work.