My grandmother, who had a significant hand in raising me, also raised all 7 of her kids through the deadliest famine in human history. All of her kids survived - an incredible feat.

Here’s a portrait I made of her as part of my “Here You Are - Finding Yourself Among Your Ancestors” series. I miss her.

I started by sketching a portrait of her in pencil. I then selected the collage materials from magazines and catalogues that I come across. I find the backdrop of Edible magazine to be particularly poignant given grandma’s experience with famine. She spent her entire life near the sea, so I also enjoy that her hair is a photo of a sunrise on the beach.

In the reference photo, she is wearing a black vest featuring two stylized birds. I found these photos of two taxidermy birds for the collage. I had to clip one of their wings to fit and decided to clip the wing of the other one, too. My grandmother had bound feet, a practice that tightly bound little girls’ feet so that their toes broke and that their feet remained small. The idea was that a woman with broken feet was unable to do physical labor and so was of higher social status, and a woman with smaller feet was considered more beautiful. Foot binding had been recently outlawed when my grandmother was born in 1919, but her parents and many others continued to practice it for decades afterwards. And as fate would have it, my grandmother ended up doing many years of physical labor despite her broken feet, hauling scrap metal at the local shipyards.

(The above is excerpted and edited from my weekly(ish) art emails, The Free Association. Sign up at my website to receive more art and writing like this direct to your inbox.)

The original is not for sale, but archival prints are available for purchase.