In this piece, Honey returns to the woman who shaped her earliest world: her mother. She was a woman suspended between deep religious devotion and a raw, earthbound spirituality. The composition is built upon Virgin and Child (1844) by Paul Delaroche, a painting that embodies tenderness, sanctity, and the idealized mythology of motherhood passed down through Christian tradition.

Honey preserves the intimate posture of Delaroche’s Madonna while dismantling the narrative it carries.

Her mother appears crowned with a radiant halo cut from illusion paper…the symbol of holiness she wore, and the reminder that the stories defining their lives were never as absolute as they seemed. Illusion paper, a recurring signal in Honey’s work, asks the viewer to look closer… to question what has been presented as truth.

From that halo erupts a vivid red canna lily… a flower associated with strength, resilience, and life that thrives even in difficult conditions. It pushes through the illusion of sanctity like instinct through doctrine. The bloom represents the part of her mother that was grounded, intuitive, and deeply connected to the natural world… a force that could not be contained by belief alone.

Cradled in her lap is infant Honey, though her head has been replaced entirely by a television displaying a cherry pie. The substitution is deliberate. In Honey’s visual language, televisions represent mediation… the way identity, morality, and desire are shaped by what we are shown before we are old enough to choose. Sweetness, comfort, and expectation are fed through a screen… a childhood narrated before it can speak for itself.

Beneath them, the entire foundation dissolves into blurred illusion paper, humming like static beneath memory. It is the unstable ground of their shared past (religion, purity culture, shame, love, silence) always present, always shifting.

Carved into that foundation is a single pit, and within it rests a half-peeled apple. The apple of original sin. The peel unfinished. It represents the inherited labor demanded of women… the work of purity, self-policing, and moral correction that can never truly be completed because it was never theirs to begin with. Buried within illusion paper, the apple becomes a relic of a belief system built on contradictions and impossible expectations.

This piece is both homage and rupture… a conversation across generations, across belief systems, across art history. By reworking Delaroche’s Madonna through her own lived experience, Honey transforms sanctity into inquiry, reverence into reckoning.

It is a portrait of mother and daughter bound by love, myth, belief, and awakening…
and a meditation on the long, necessary process of unlearning what was never ours to carry.