Brunelle Dias - A Love Letter to my Mother; Parts of a Whole

"When I was younger and learning to read, I struggled with words. The ‘big words’, confusing words, and the words with the silent letters. Orchestra; unique; angel or was it angle?

My mother taught me to stop promptly at the ‘big words’, the confusing words and the silent lettered words and then recite them out loud in order to “break down” the word to its simplest root form for clarity of meaning. If still unsure, I was informed to read the sentence that embraced the ‘big word’ - to get an immediate context. Generally, “breaking down” the ‘big word’ and reading it within the context of it’s sentence, I’d grasp the gist of the author’s intention.

Yet there were times even when “breaking down” words with regards to their peripheral sentences, where I simply failed to comprehend their meaning. My mother sharply instructed me to return to the top of the paragraph where the ‘big word’ resided and then infer its meaning through my comprehension of the paragraph.

Reluctantly, I’d followed her suggestions, however, through the broader context of the word, provided by the paragraph, I learnt to construe greater meanings and its relevance to the word within a holistic approach. The english language’s illogical unaccented word structure was enough to mentally handicap my 6-year-old brain. If I couldn't decipher the ‘big words’ even after utilizing all the tools my mother taught me, she would blankly tell me to move on; to read on and to return to the noted word again once I had completed the entire text".

Brunelle Dias (born 1998, India) has majored in the field of Painting at the Auckland University of Technology, receiving her BVA in 2019. Her works underscore the hybrid nature of migration as she uses paint as a language to traverse borderless understandings of dwelling between both Eastern and Western Frameworks.

Happenstance, ephemeral and provisional scraps of thoughts that inhabit her mind are significant moments/subject matter that are critical to understanding her practice; be it lingerings of phone conversations, flicking through childhood photos, peeling a mandarin or the texture of clay in between her fingers.