Back to New Stories
Within the Hourglass (2025)
Mix Media: Canvas, Oil, Thread, 30”x30”
Within the Hourglass explores the quiet liberation of growing older. At its center lies an hourglass, not filled with sand but with an unraveling human form — measuring not time, but the vitality surrendered to expectation. This is where the journey begins.
From the hourglass, stitched concentric circles spiral outward, forming a labyrinth of language. The innermost rings speak in dark thread: career, money, beauty, family roles — stitched tightly, constraining. As the path expands, the words soften into questions, then open into realizations. The thread loosens. The colors lighten. The form exhales.
At the outer edge, the stitched circles dissolve into a painted pair of feet — stepping forward, calm and knowing. This is not escape but emergence: a life reclaimed from roles, pressures, and self-erasure. The stitched words are not decorative but carried — sewn into the body over time. Thread was chosen because stitching is slow, deliberate, domestic — an act of reclamation mirroring the process of becoming.
Through thread, color, and metaphor, Within the Hourglass reframes aging not as decline but as return: a freedom from performance, a freedom to be present, a freedom to be whole.
Within the Hourglass will be exhibited in Age In Our Times, presented by The Health Museum, Houston, at the Texas Medical Center Research Building.
