COUSINHOOD

This piece is more personal; it's about the relationship my sister and I have with our three cousins. I feel that cousinhood is really underappreciated in many art forms, so I feel extremely lucky to have such good experiences that led me to make this piece. There are five of us and we have been together since we came to the world really. The four flowers are one for each of them and the tiny bee near the top purple flower is me. When my family moved to England, one of the hardest things to do was not getting to see me them on a daily basis. You can see the two lands (UK and Italy) being separated by the ocean (I know that Italy is not so close to England on the map, but there's an ocean dividing them nonetheless so, for the sake of this drawing, I drew them this way). The stems of the flowers go in two different directions as well (it's a little inaccurate though; it should've been one steam going to the left and three to the right).

In the water there are numbers scattered around; those numbers can be used to measure the length of time we have been separated. But there is a thing I noticed that I cherish very much; the love that we have for each other didn't fade away. On the contrary, it just blossomed even further. Whenever we see each other again, we don't waste any second. This was very important to me and I wanted to show it through this piece; there's a hand coming out of the water and curling around the start of the stems and holding them together. The distance brings us closer. Out of the stems come leaves; I drew things we love in them.

This piece seems to be timeless, yet stuck at a certain time. We have already changed so much from the creation of this piece, but I hope that I will never have to redraw a version of this with different meanings.

My sister once told me something about us five that still resonate with me a lot:

God made us cousins because He knew that our mothers couldn't handle us as siblings.