Impermanence.

I have a jewelry box where I keep special items I no longer wear, most of them earrings that have lost their mate. I did this as a way to remember the sweetness of the gift, long before a new meaning of “losing one’s mate” came into my life. This survivor of my first Frida Kahlo earrings is now blurry inside the glass, as if Frida breathed her last breath in there. It’s time to lay the next generation survivor in the box with her, to keep her company.

For this portrait I laid Frida against a kerchief that was my mother’s, where I found a tiny blood stain that must have been there for at least twenty years.