A Broken Heart: The Law of Repetition — Original Sculpture

A Broken Heart: The Law of Repetition explores the ways brokenness can move through generations, repeating itself until someone makes the conscious decision to interrupt the cycle.

The sculpture is composed of five wooden platforms, each formed as one half of a heart. Although the platforms differ in shape, size and stain, they rest upon one another as a family, representing five individual lives that remain connected despite their differences.

Above them stand five broken sculptural hearts. Each was created from the same plaster mold. This repetition is intentional. The fracture present in the first heart appears again in every heart that follows, illustrating how unresolved wounds, behaviors and patterns can reproduce themselves from one generation to the next, even as each person develops an identity and life of their own.

When properly illuminated, the work extends beyond its physical materials. The shadow of one broken heart falls across the level beneath it, creating a visual representation of how one life can cast itself onto another. What remains unresolved in one generation can become part of the environment inherited by the next.

The work grew from my experience and responsibility as a mother. When I became a parent, I became deeply conscious of what we pass to our children beyond the things we intentionally give them. I wanted my daughter to have the opportunity to build her own life without carrying wounds and burdens that belonged to generations before her, baggage she neither earned nor deserved.

A Broken Heart acknowledges that family connects us through more than resemblance. We can inherit strengths, traditions and love, but we can also inherit patterns that cause harm. Inheritance, however, does not require repetition.

The final question of the work is therefore not whether our past has shaped us. It has. The question is what we will allow to continue through us.