In Chinese mythology, pearls are the tears of the moon, fallen into water.

Eighty strings of 168 pearls, each cradled in natural beeswax and threaded onto red cotton string, hang as a curtain of accumulated feeling. The numbers carry the resonance of luck and new beginnings. Beneath, a moving image of the moon pools on the floor like a reflection on still water.

The making was slow, deliberate, with many hands. What we carry, we carry together.

To walk through is to leave something behind — tears, sadness, the weight of what has been. On the other side, the new year waits.

. . .

Moonlight Embrace was created for Passage of Night: Luminary Rising, a Lunar New Year exhibition curated by Willoughby City Council, 2024. 

I hope one day to expand this work, imagining multiple curtains filling a large space, the projected moon moving beneath them all like light scattered across water.