The Mending is a large-scale mixed-media work constructed from the fragmented remains of two prior paintings, cut apart and reassembled into a new whole. Sections of painted canvas overlap, curl, and collide across the surface — held together by nails, hand-stitching in both white and black thread, and lengths of taut wire that lace across open gaps like sutures drawn tight over a wound.

The piece refuses easy resolution. Edges are raw and unfinished; threads dangle and ribbons spill beyond the frame, resisting containment. A cascade of multicolored ribbon streams from the upper right — decorative, almost celebratory, yet anchored to the same structural tension that holds everything else in place.

The Mending marks a turning point. After years working as an abstract expressionist painter, this is where the practice broke open — where cutting, stitching, and assembling became as essential as the brush. What reads at a distance as a unified composition reveals itself up close as an act of deliberate, labor-intensive repair — not erasure of damage, but its honest acknowledgment. And in that act of repair, something new became possible.