Unraveling

©Leonie.e.Brown, The Unraveling. Oil, cold wax, embroidery thread, mixed media on canvas, 100 x 100cm.

With Gallery Links: Available at LifeArt | Singulart | Saatchi Art | The Artling |

“The Unraveling” marks the pivotal beginning of my “Threads of Life” series—a moment when art became not just expression, but survival.

This 100x100cm square canvas holds a truth I couldn’t speak any other way: sometimes we must first fall apart before we can truly heal. The primary colors aren’t arbitrary—blue, red, and yellow represent body, soul, and spirit, the three fundamental elements of our being. When the soul is wounded, we desperately try to fill those holes with anything—addictions, control, the illusion of safety. But healing doesn’t begin until we face what’s actually missing.

I created this painting twice. The first time, I approached it simply, almost carefully. Then came a personal breakdown that shattered my careful control. I was drowning in anger—at being invisible, at having no voice, at wounds I’d carried silently for years, particularly toward my mother. I needed to destroy something. So I destroyed this canvas. I punched holes through it, tearing into layers I’d just built.

Those holes remain. They’re not mistakes—they’re the point.

The embroidery thread you see isn’t decoration. Inspired by Bessel van der Kolk’s research on trauma and the body, each stitch creates a new pathway across the canvas, modeling how our brains forge connections that bypass damaged neural circuits. Some threads hang loose and raw. Others create tight bridges between fractured areas. This is the visual language of integration, of weaving our broken pieces into something that can hold both the wound and the healing.

Oil, cold wax, hot wax, inks, and mixed media create textured layers that built up and broke down repeatedly during creation—a physical record of the emotional process itself. The work is tactile, dimensional, refusing to stay safely flat or contained.

This painting taught me that the most courageous act isn’t holding yourself together. It’s allowing yourself to come completely apart—and then, with patience and fierce compassion, stitching yourself back together in a way that makes room for who you’re becoming, not who you were told to be.

The holes don’t need to be hidden. The anger doesn’t need to be polished into something prettier. Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting—it means embracing and understanding. It means recognizing that our brokenness has shaped us into something unexpectedly, courageously beautiful.

This is where my “Threads of Life” journey began: in destruction, in honesty, in the refusal to pretend healing is anything other than messy, profound, and absolutely necessary.

#LeonieEBrownArt #TheUnraveling #ThreadsOfLife #ContemporaryAbstract #MixedMediaArt #AbstractArtWithTexture #EmbroideryInArt