ARTIST STATEMENT
This work is a practice of visual journaling that transforms emotional processing into ceremonial expression. Rooted in drawing, painting, writing and reflecting, my process is an act of metabolizing the overwhelming — a sacred and necessary ritual of making sense of the world around me. This series, Shared Notes on the Painful Loss of Freedom, is both protest and healing. Created through my daily practice of journaling in response to the growing political conflict around women’s reproductive autonomy, it reckons with the erosion of these rights through fragmented, faceless female forms that echo the collective trauma of being reduced to bodies — politicized, controlled, and silenced. Working primarily in black ink on white paper, I emphasize the stark polarity of what has been lost — the brutal clarity of freedom stripped away. The contrast becomes symbolic: black and white as both formal element and metaphor, mirroring the moral absolutes imposed on complex, embodied lives. Each piece becomes a page in a ceremonial journal. Through repeated gestures — drawing, writing, obscuring — I enact a form of resistance and reclamation. The facelessness of the figures speaks to shared struggle, beyond individual identity. Yet they are not static in their pain. The inclusion of botanicals and grounded feet offers a metaphor for resilience — a ceremonial offering to regeneration and rootedness. In time of unrest, my expressive practice serves as both witness and dissent — holding space for grief and resistance, while affirming the artist’s role in activating change through visual ceremony.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Mary Rose Deraco is a Los Angeles–based visual artist whose expressive, mixed-media practice bridges the spiritual, political, and deeply personal. Working from a converted open-air garage studio perched above the Los Angeles basin, she creates large-scale, gestural works that reflect both the urgency of inner transformation and the expansive landscape around her.
Rooted in drawing, painting, collage, and writing, Deraco approaches art-making as a ritualized, therapeutic practice. Her process is immersive and physical — climbing ladders, pouring paint, and working across vast surfaces in conversation with music, movement, and intuition. The resulting work is colorful, lyrical, and emotionally resonant, often infused with themes of grief, healing, resistance, and regeneration. Deraco’s recent series explores the impact of political conflict on the female body, engaging with issues like reproductive autonomy, identity, and collective trauma. Through the use of fragmented forms, symbolic botanicals, and ceremonial mark-making, she transforms personal experience into visual storytelling that invites connection and reflection. For Deraco, art is not just a form of expression — it is a sacred, daily practice that opens space for witnessing, transformation, and hope. Her studio serves as both sanctuary and site of resistance, where emotion becomes image and silence gives way to voice.
© Mary Rose Deraco