Artist statement

The Book of the Heart was made during a period of compounding grief: personal loss colliding with bearing witness to the massacre of thousands of innocent children in Gaza. Every day for over two years, a constant stream of gore was served up to me on my iphone as I scrolled through social media. I saw parts of children being collected in garbage bags by their surviving family members. I saw children who ate batteries because they were starving. I saw teenage prisoners released from torture facilities who had been pushed far beyond any human limits. I saw toddlers running through flames with flesh hanging off. I saw a young man self-immolate and scream “Free Gaza” as his flesh dropped off in chunks onto the ground.His video was banned. I saw a young man being anally raped to death by his captors.
And yet, due to legal reasons, people in power who had the moral duty to say stop did nothing. They provided cover under the propaganda that couched these crimes as self-defense. Every murdered civilian was called Hamas, even infants, journalists, and photographers who steadfastly tried to report the situation from the ground by jury-rigging solar panels on demolished rooftops.

I had just lost my mom to a tragic death in a facility after a brutal ten year battle with dementia. My 14-year-old dog Leo died several months later. I could barely stand up due to my grief. I painted daily. Painting was the structure that kept me upright. It gave me a purpose and a surface to accept my pain. While researching grief, the singular word just didn’t seem enough to capture the tumult of emotions that I felt. I found many Japanese words for ghosts and lingering spirits, animated spirits, and entities with multi-faceted appearances who remained in the here and now after their human death. Yūrei, ikiryō, onryō: words for beings that refuse to cross over, who refused to extinguish parts of their human selves by clinging to the earthly dimension. These figures and presences became ideas for paintings. I had worked with the concept of grief and ghosts in the past with Lovers and Demons and decided to explore it further. I felt haunted. I felt like I needed to do something. The animated spirits became super heroes traveling through the ether with their former personalities intact. I used brushes, brayers, free association, and music to drive the motion. I worked in a trance, sometimes for hours, exhausted, driven by compulsion. I produced dozens of paintings over months and then painted over them in hours. The act of painting became both anesthetic and ritual. The marks in this series are traces of that pressure.

Macaulay Woods—July, 2026