Not Mine To Wear

48” x 48” Mixed media painting on cradled ply panel.

“Not Mine to Wear” explores release from inherited shame and the journey toward healing — a visual metaphor for letting go of burdens not ultimately yours to bear.

Not Mine to Wear (2025) is a sister piece to Hand Me Down and it functions as a kind of unconventional self-portrait. In the painting, we find a figure with exaggerated limbs standing directly in the centre of the composition. Behind the figure are, once again, a series of black orbs outlined in rough pencil, alongside the silhouette of seven celestial bodies. Most notably, an enormous “X” separates the foreground figure from those in the background. Not only a portrait, the painting also represents a revelation of sorts. After the death of his father, Michael describes carrying around feelings of shame, as though he was “wearing a coat made of tar—dark, suffocating, and impossible to remove.” Whenever he shared the story of his father, “it felt as though the person listening became stained by it too, marked by something they couldn’t wash away.” That weight was lifted one day when a friend told him that the coat was not Michael’s to wear. “That simple truth changed my life,” he writes. As such, the painting recalls the experience of unburdening that weight of stigma, of relieving that burning sense of shame. Beyond that, in sharing experiences of inter-generational trauma, it moves toward finding productive ways to heal. - Matthew Ryan Smith