The featured artist for the “On Prayer” Community Anthology is Lillian X. Zhao. Below is an artist statement that describes the artwork they created for the anthology. You can see the imagery below.
As someone who sees relationships as the meaning to life, “prayer” has always come easy to me. It exists in my family, my friends, and familiar spaces that keep me with peace. Though I’m not religious, each night I am pushed to pray to whatever god or entity can keep this love safe. They are what keep me tethered to this earth, and what creates the bedrock of my world.
Yet these days, this dream is what pressures me to seek out a knife’s edge. There is a point in time where one must confront the reality that their previous relationships to self are dead. What becomes of prayer then when the reasons why we pray bring attention to loss? If my relationships in this world are the root of all that I do, then what do I envision when I wish for a life without the burden of them? It is no longer safe to believe these relationships help keep me grounded, instead I feel suffocated from being free.
As the artist to represent the anthologies theme “On Prayer,” I’ve thought long and hard about how I could contribute to the making of this community, all while trying to relate this conflict inside me. I explored connections personal to the making of self, drawing moments that held significant meaning while choosing to omit the more obvious details that would have tied its relation back to me.
In this process of becoming unmoored from my original connections around “prayer” and negotiating the intimate relationships surrounding it for me, there was no clear indicator to the person I was becoming, just a state of feeling suspended, never knowing how the picture would ever become complete.
In this regard, I reckon this is what faith is like to the faithless. Prayer itself is not resolute nor comforting, instead it is a grief to a time when things were enduring. It is not safe nor active in its ability to keep us alive, it is the first loss in understanding what cannot be envisioned in its entirety. Yet what emerged in my drawings is a truth I believe we can not deny; though I set out to convey a series of images to highlight gaps in my own definition of prayer, I was left with a sight that defied its expectations.
For each image that focused on capturing the reality of such conflict, the reliance of white space was just as essential to emphasizing the heightened sensation of loss as much as the delicate touch in rendering the remainder with high detail to communicate its memory.
Instead of asking for a reflection in grief, it sought out my imagination to ponder its unemerged narrative in a quiet attempt to continue searching for meaning.
In the end, I still cannot share with you what prayer means to me, because it is quickly becoming unknown to me. Drawing enabled me to physically demarcate where the boundaries of both positive and negative space joined to offer an image that was complete in its understanding of this struggle, and give various bodies to the in-between sensations one experiences on the unknowable path to becoming.
As a community seeking to find forms in expressing our limits on prayer, I can only help you observe that Prayer is a creature, a bond, and a type of liminal space with a character that remains so innate in us even if it disappears, it still exists to be seen.
