Invisible Mothers: Creating Through Grief

A Post–Mother’s Day Reflection

Where is the golden child that never was?
She lives here. In yarn and pigment. In stitched bone and unspoken prayers.

Each year, Mother’s Day arrives like an old wound reopening.

My biological mother died when I was three, a casualty of Camp Lejeune’s poisoned waters.
My stepmother—the only true mother I ever knew—died when I was twenty.
She raised me. She saved me. Then she left me.

I’ve never held a child of my own.

This painting—framed in the tenderness of hand-crochet, streaked with the colors of loss and longing—is a mirror of a life imagined.
A radiant soul never born, yet somehow always felt.
Her eyes are wide with questions the world won’t answer.
Her lips are soft with a voice I’ll never hear.

This piece is titled with the ache that haunts so many of us:
“Where is the golden child that never was?”

It is part of The Empty Womb, a 27-piece installation that emerged from the double grief of losing my mothers—and the one grief I carry still:
The one who never came.

The last thing my biological mother ever said to me before her final hospital stay:
“You’re such a good little artist.”
She stayed. I went home.
I never saw her again.

That sentence—those seven words—may be the reason I make art.

Because I cannot mother a child, I mother beauty.
Because I cannot bear life, I bear witness.

To those who feel unseen on Mother's Day: I see you.
To those who have lost a child, or a mother, or the dream of either: I am with you.
To those who create because they cannot carry—may you know that your creations, too, are sacred.

Art is how I stitch myself back together.
It is how I carry my lineage forward, even when the bloodline ends with me.

To all grieving motherless daughters, healing mother wounds, and infertile women:
Let my art be a place where you find home. I’ve got you.

Until the golden child returns in another form…

With love,
Robbi

✨ Call to Action

Inquire about “The Empty Womb” for museum acquisition, private viewing, or collector interest.
Book a private session or retreat in my Santa Fe studio—a sacred space for creativity, grief, healing, and rebirth.
Follow along on Instagram or join my collector circle to witness how art becomes devotion.

Robbi Firestone

Robbi Firestone is a multi disciplinary artist exploring diverse mediums to provoke thought from oil & pastels to found objects. Her abstract painting series Serene Landscapes in Savage Color captures vibrant landscapes.

Her Infertility Project, The Empty Womb, launched at the UN (+documentary film re: silent grief), while her 4-foot-tall Cheetos portrait of Donald Trump spotlights America’s insatiable appetite for ‘bite-sized’ media: a trivial pursuit communicated by a snack portrait

Featured in The NY Times, Worth & LA Travel, Firestone's work spans into digital media with immersive virtual reality performances to captivate at VIP corporate events & conferences.

Robbi Firestone creates art in physical, virtual, augmented and mixed realities as a Web3 Creator/NFT artist, performer, Creative Director, & NFT project consultant.

Firestone's focus is to inspire, empower, educate and embolden mission driven, talented, conscious Creators to design a new, equitable, healthy future for humanity and planet via Web3.

Firestone feely traverses from digital NFTs to IRL traditional and non-art mediums to most effectively, '...render or reconcile my message."

https://www.RoFirestone.com
Previous
Previous

Aesthetic Arrest: Why Civilization Cannot Exist Without Art

Next
Next

🖤 The Art World Is Starved