I am an abstract painter completing my thesis year of my BFA at OCAD University (Toronto, ON). My practice is located between Toronto, ON, and Chatham, ON. My practice is obsessed with the kitsch qualities of the perfect home, qualities of women’s work and traditional images that are produced around idealized romantic relationships, as work conceptually discusses the discourse of romantic relationships. My work originated as a method of self-care, creating a visual language of mark making that communicates and reclaims emotional trauma from romantic relationships in addressing ambiguous loss, a term coined by Pauline Boss. Ambiguous loss, defined as experiencing grief or mourning the loss for people who are still alive. My work operates to process trauma and to reclaim memory by documenting visually the on-going process of emotional healing. I have a strong attachment to the philosophy of Roland Barthes (A Lovers Discourse: Fragments) and am constantly rereading about the lived and learned knowledge of love from Diane Ackerman and bell hooks. I confront the distaste or taboo of visually communicating romance within visual works of art, using the language of kitsch which allows the work to be excessive and garish, overly sentimental and ironic. Playing with the constructed idealized romantic relationship rituals that are practiced today commercially through the language of craft, the work speaks upon romantic emotions which are considered cliché of a heartbroken woman through the academic understanding of the lover’s discourse.