Forever Yours, Ladybug is a devotional archive about being loved and still wanting to run from it. The project started from a small, embarrassing feeling: the moment when affection becomes so direct that it almost feels like pressure. I wanted to make a book about that tiny flinch, not as rejection, but as evidence that being cared for can be its own kind of exposure.
The book is built from federal blue cotton duck canvas, cyanotyped fabric pages, glass, thread, scans, lace, and collected fragments. It uses coptic binding so the object can open flat, but it still feels guarded, handmade, and a little stubborn. The slowness of the process matters. Coating fabric, waiting for sun, rinsing blue out of cloth, stitching the pages one by one, all of it turns the book into a record of attention.
The ladybug is personal because my boyfriend calls me his ladybug. In the project, that nickname becomes a small devotional symbol: tender, a little embarrassing, lucky, bright, and impossible for me to separate from being cared for. It turns a private name into an object, and then into a way of looking at intimacy without making it too clean.
I think of the project as a diary, a prayer book, and a receipt for every time my boyfriend tried to get close and I flinched. It is about wanting intimacy, fearing it, documenting it, and then making an object that lets someone else touch that contradiction. You can open it. Or just hold it. Either one is kind of the point.
