Mortal Fragments
The Art of Becoming Whole
Creative Arts Guild
Gallery One11
520 W. Waugh Street
Dalton, GA
February 6 - February 27, 2025
Artist Talk/Reception Feb 6, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Exhibition Statement
Mortal Fragments: The Art of Becoming Whole is a meditation on assembly—on how lives, identities, and meanings are constructed not from completeness, but from what remains. The works in this exhibition begin with fragments: pieces of wood, pieces of memory, pieces of story. They are shaped, joined, and layered into forms that resist perfection, holding visible seams as evidence of their making.
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Intarsia, by nature, is an art of fitting disparate parts into a unified whole. In this body of work, that process becomes metaphor. Each piece reflects the tension between damage and repair, inheritance and choice, loss and continuity. Rather than concealing fractures, these works honor the labor of restoration—suggesting that wholeness is not the absence of breakage, but the act of tending to what has been broken.
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Folklore, myth, and imagined narratives serve as a language for experiences that resist direct telling. Figures emerge that feel both familiar and unsettled: guardians, children, animals, symbolic companions. They do not offer fixed meanings. Instead, they operate as thresholds—inviting viewers to project their own memories, questions, and associations into the space between image and story.
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Mortal Fragments asks for slow looking. It asks what we carry forward, what we repair, and what we choose to preserve. The exhibition does not propose resolution. It offers presence. In doing so, it suggests that becoming whole is not a destination, but an ongoing act—one shaped by the fragments we refuse to discard.
Key Themes
Fragments
Lives are not built whole. They are assembled from what remains—memories retained, stories inherited, moments salvaged from loss or change. In these works, fragments are not provisional. They are essential. Each piece acknowledges that meaning emerges through accumulation rather than completion.
Repair
These works do not attempt to erase damage. Instead, they make visible the labor of restoration—the fitting, mending, and rejoining required to hold something together. Repair is presented not as correction, but as care: a deliberate act that gives shape to survival.
Inheritance
What is passed forward—promises, fears, resilience, silence—shapes what comes next. The figures and narratives in this exhibition reflect the ways identity is formed at the intersection of what is given and what is chosen. Inheritance here is both burden and gift.
Myth & Memory
Folklore and imagined narratives provide a language for experiences that resist literal description. These works draw from myth not to escape reality, but to approach it obliquely—allowing memory, symbol, and imagination to coexist without hierarchy.
Becoming
Wholeness is treated not as an end state, but as a process continually in motion. The works remain open, unresolved, and provisional—suggesting that becoming whole is an ongoing act shaped by attention, presence, and the willingness to hold complexity.