This series, titled Worry Dolls, revisits a childhood ritual I didn’t fully understand until adulthood. As a child, I experienced what I now recognize as nighttime anxiety—persistent, unspoken worries that surfaced in the dark. In response, my mom gave me a small wooden circle filled with tiny worry dolls. Each night, I would share a concern to every doll before placing them back in their box, as if transferring the weight of my thoughts into their stitched bodies.
Using found imagery and digital collage, I recreated that exchange of emotional labor—digitally layering fragmented faces, textures, and symbols to form contemporary versions of those protective figures. The resulting works are not literal dolls, but emotional surrogates: tender, surreal portraits of entanglement and inner noise. Saturated colors and mirrored forms evoke the disorientation of anxious thought loops, while floral and painterly overlays suggest the comfort of care and ritual.
Worry Dolls becomes both a visual archive of past overwhelm and a reclamation of comfort—a space where digital tools meet memory, vulnerability, and inherited maternal protection.
