What Was Never Registered
Watercolor, ink, and pencil on the reverse of a birth certificate (c. 1920s)
2024

This illustration was made on the back of an original birth certificate from the 1920s, found folded and tucked among loose papers in the back of an antique store - unarchived, unattended, nearly lost.

The certificate was chosen deliberately to stand in for the birth certificate that I’ll never have for a child I’ll never have.

Rather than rendering sorrow directly, I painted something sweet on the reverse, allowing tenderness and beauty to emerge where loss and images of pain might be expected. This a true representation of my childlessness grief journey.

The work asks for slow looking, both out of respect for the delicacy of the paper and the subject it holds, honoring beauty as a legitimate language of grief.