This painting technically began more than two years ago, during my pregnancy. Because of medical complications, I tracked nearly every aspect of my health through charts, logs, and handwritten notes. After my son was born, that documentation shifted almost entirely to him. My husband and I filled what felt like an entire book with records of his first year—sleep schedules, feedings, diapers, milestones, and countless other details intended to measure his well-being.

As I adjusted to motherhood while trying to understand where my artistic practice fit within this new identity, I began questioning the purpose of all this documentation. The information those records contain is invaluable, but it cannot account for the experience itself. The moments that ultimately shape our lives rarely fit neatly into charts and diagrams; they exist instead through memories that are fragmented, emotional, layered, and constantly shifting. Around this time, a butterfly repeatedly landed near me during moments of reflection, becoming an unexpected reminder that transformation often arrives quietly and without permission.

The work incorporates the very documents that once tracked my pregnancy and my son's first year, alongside photographs, traces of our shared experiences, his early experiments with art materials, and physical remnants of our time together. Rather than concealing these records beneath layers of paint, I leave fragments visible, allowing systems of measurement to be absorbed into the emotional landscape of memory. Inspired by the freedom and unpredictability of my son's marks, I also loosened my own process, embracing uncertainty and allowing colors to bleed together, forms to remain unresolved, and gestures to emerge intuitively.

Rather than documenting motherhood alone, the work examines how significant life experiences reshape the ways memory is created, preserved, and understood. Motherhood functions as both subject and catalyst, prompting a reconsideration of what constitutes an archive. Painting becomes an alternative form of record that values ambiguity alongside precision, lived experience alongside documentation, and preserves traces of what inevitably exceed measurement.