Canvas:
Traditional Burmese fabric serves as the canvas for this work, carrying layered cultural meanings tied to femininity, ritual, and social stigma. The textile references the htamain—a women’s skirt historically regarded as impure or unlucky—transforming a material associated with restriction into a site of reflection and resistance.

Technique:
Acrylic paint and paper collage are applied directly onto the fabric surface. Painted figures coexist with collaged photographic fragments, allowing the patterned textile to remain visible and active. The interaction between image and fabric creates a visual rhythm that moves between softness and interruption, intimacy and tension.

Process:
The work is developed through layering and restraint, using suggestion rather than direct depiction. By embedding historical imagery within the body and allowing fabric to frame the composition, the process reflects on memory, care, and survival without resorting to overt representations of violence.

Artwork Description:
Within the Depths of My Heart, I Carry Yours approaches war and conflict through intimacy rather than spectacle. A seated female figure occupies the patterned fabric ground, her body partially formed from collaged photographic fragments that quietly reference collective memory. Rather than portraying destruction directly, the work holds space for reflection, grief, and endurance.

The background textile recalls the cultural stigma attached to women’s garments in Myanmar, particularly the htamain. This stigma—once used to marginalize women—was later transformed into a powerful tool of protest after the 2021 military coup, when women hung skirts across streets to block military and police forces. While the artist’s use of fabric predates these protests, the work resonates with and commemorates this act of creative resistance.

The figure’s calm, inward posture suggests care and emotional inheritance—carrying not only personal memory, but the weight of others’ experiences. Through fabric, collage, and restraint, the painting reflects on how conflict is lived internally and collectively, offering a meditation on love, responsibility, and resilience in the midst of displacement and uncertainty.