Nightingale

“So the Nightingale pressed

closer against the thorn, and the

thorn touched her heart, and a

fierce pang of pain shot through

her. Bitter, bitter was the pain,

and wilder and wilder grew her

song, for she sang of the Love

that is perfected by Death…”

-Oscar Wilde, The Nightingale and

the Rose

Nightingale is a series of still and moving images of the artist's mother. Harkening back to Western literary and artistic symbolism, the nightingale has often appeared as a metaphor for both love and loss. As the protagonist in a narrative of human fragility and tenacity, the subject symbolically embodies the twin impulses of living and dying. Nightingale explores the inescapable reality of age and loss and the beauty made acute by this inevitability.