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A Quarter In by Maryanne D'Silva

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Maryanne is a self-taught artist working in acrylic and mixed media. What began as a personal hobby has grown into a genuine and ongoing exploration of the human experience, each canvas becoming a place where color, texture, and layered materials come together to say something words often cannot. At the heart of her work is the theme of the journey of life. She is drawn to the way a path unfolds unevenly, full of turns, pauses, and moments of unexpected brightness, and she translates that sense of movement into compositions that feel both intuitive and deep. Her mixed-media approach lets her build up surfaces the way memory accumulates: in fragments, textures, and traces that reveal themselves slowly. She paints from a spirit of curiosity rather than formula, trusting instinct over rules. The result is a body of work that invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and find echoes of their own stories within hers.


"A quarter in" is about hyperemesis gravidarum. HG is not morning sickness. It is months of relentless, disabling illness — starvation, dehydration, scent and sight and taste stolen — a body at war with the pregnancy it is fighting to sustain. Only a quarter of the way into carrying our first child, I was too weak to speak, communicating through scribbled cue cards: water, pain, help me. And I was, again and again, dismissed. The poem moves between "I" and "she" deliberately. That was the truth of it — pain that severe pushes you outside your own body. I became a witness to myself: a woman screaming for life that no one stopped to hear, wheeled back to cold waiting rooms, timing cycles of emesis against an old ticking clock, humming the rhythm of pain beside my love. I was too afraid to even say "my baby," terrified of what the sickness, and the treatments, and my own desperate thoughts of escape might mean for that piece of us. The lines are short and stripped bare because the experience was: hunger, fear, silence, waiting. My intention is recognition and a plea for help in equal measure. Recognition for every woman who has carried HG invisibly. A plea for help because the closing questions — "Can nobody hear her? Can nobody hear us?" — were real questions, asked of healthcare professionals who did not listen.