Still Warm is an ongoing series exploring death through the lens of my lived experiences. I paint from what I experience, so I am fascinated by the impossibility of painting death itself. I won't live death until it happens. So, I'm painting rehearsals for death. I paint rituals, endings, beginnings, aftermaths, pageantry, and the transformations that come with every kind of loss. Each work translates the unknown of death into the familiar.

I am drawn to death because of its taboo. Speaking of death can be treated as superstitious, as if saying it will bring it closer. But death is the one inevitable of life and its presence extends beyond our final breath. In Still Warm, I do not hide death away, but I stage it as it presents itself in my life. 

I chose the title Still Warm because it marks the moment just after loss, where someone's spirit has slipped away, but the body has not yet gone cold. It is a reminder that death and letting go are not instant. Still Warm inhabits that suspended space where absence and presence exist at once, where grief and hope overlap.

Still Warm is also an act of reclamation. I am alive enough to imagine my own death, stage my own funeral, and perform the rituals of undoing before anyone else does them for me. I claim authorship over what is usually written for someone in their absence. I will narrate my own becoming while I am still here.