MEMORIA

She has been watching us for two thousand years. The face at the heart of this work carries the grave, unblinking gaze of the Fayum portrait tradition — those haunting encaustic likenesses painted on Egyptian mummy cases in the first centuries of the Common Era, meant to hold a soul in place across time. Kathryn Cirincione, who grew up within a lineage of Italian church muralists and stained glass makers, knows this gaze intimately. She did not copy it. She channeled it. Around the face, the world intrudes — as it always does in Cirincione's studio. To the left, a burst of deep teal rises like a spirit or a storm, threaded with dark organic lines that suggest roots, nerves, or the branching tributaries of a delta. To the right, a column of wavering vertical marks — part musical notation, part seismic reading, part coastal rainfall — anchors the composition in the present tense. The warm Fabriano paper holds all of this together the way memory holds contradiction: softly, imperfectly, beautifully. This is a work about looking and being looked at. About what survives. About the women whose faces were considered worth preserving and the vast silence around them. Cirincione made it in Bolinas, on a California coast shaped by tides and time, and it carries both that geography and the deep Mediterranean world she has inhabited across a lifetime of travel, teaching, and making.