Bent Pin

Medium: Mixed Media on Wood
Size: 3ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Out of Darkness

Bent Pin (2023) is a meditation on brokenness as potential. Part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this 36 x 48 inch mixed media painting on wood reclaims disruption as a generative force. The “bent pin” in the title is both literal and metaphorical — a small object transformed by pressure, now carrying its own quiet dignity.

Built on a raw wood panel, the piece is constructed with painted layers, embedded materials, and scraped surfaces. The color palette leans toward muted metals — oxidized copper, brushed steel, bruised plum — punctuated by a single curving gesture in bone white. The texture is tactile, even industrial.

This work emerged during a moment of internal friction — when I was questioning the usefulness of perfection. Bent Pin became a metaphor for resilience, for the elegance in something skewed yet still functioning.

The painting shares a quiet kinship with the work of Eva Hesse, whose fragile materials and malformed structures speak of vulnerability as a site of power. Like Hesse, I believe the irregular can be beautiful — even more honest than what’s pristine.

Bent Pin doesn’t shout. It endures. It holds the memory of resistance, of pressure endured without collapse. There’s tension in the form — a line pulled taut, a surface dented but deliberate.

As part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this painting is a small monument to survival. It says: even a bent pin can hold things together.