Gallery Collection 45 - ‘The Cost of Feeings’

The ‘Cost of Feelings’ displays glossy red hearts, one large and one smaller, on a raw white canvas. From the point of each heart, trails of crushed red glass spill downward like shrapnel. The hand-painted and slightly uneven, hearts have been painted with brushstrokes and imperfections showing through the gloss. It is simple, direct, and physical. The negative space does all the work. Two objects, two wounds, two paths of debris. It looks like a medical diagram and a valentine had a fight.

Through a neurodivergent lens, this is what happens when you come back online. The grey battery-saver mode ends and feeling floods back in. The large heart is the mask. It is bigger, shinier, better practiced. The smaller heart is what is actually inside. They are both leaking the same thing. All the red fragments are the cost of caring. The micro-traumas, the rejections, the overstimulation, the times you said the wrong thing or felt too much. They do not disappear when you mask. They collect. And when you finally let something out, they come with it. This piece is about emotional volume. Neurodivergent love is not smaller or quieter. It is intense, whole-body, and sometimes sharp. The glitter is beautiful but it is still glass. It will cut you if you try to sweep it up too fast. This is what empathy looks like when you cannot turn it down.