The Shift, 2025

Jill Mulleady

Jill Mulleady: I’m Jill Mulleady, and I live and work between Paris, Los Angeles, and Buenos Aires.
 
This painting is called The Shift, and is composed of three panels, all painted with oil on three different shades of purple and blue velvet. It’s about the crossing between worlds. It depicts a figure exhaling its last breath of life and inhaling the first breath of death—that fragile, sacred moment when the boundaries blur, and the crowd of ghosts and the crowd of the living share the same room, the same place, the same breath, at the same time
 
At the bottom of the painting, a reclining figure embodies a hermaphrodite, here a symbolic figure that holds this threshold. Neither one thing nor the other, but both—a reminder about wholeness. A figure that refuses to be confined, just as life and death refuse to be separated.
 
I painted this after losing my godmother, a woman who was a fierce lover of life. In her final days, she was already stepping into the other world. But her love for life was so strong that she would come back, just for a moment, to tell us not to be afraid. She would return from the threshold, where she had just been, and whisper that it was all good. She was enlightened. 
 
I chose purple for the weight of grief and the depth of spiritual awareness. And green as the colour for the flow of spirits— as a river that carries the soul from one shore to the other, like a knife cutting through water, or a blow of hot wind in a snowy landscape. The ghosts are in that space out of time and place, neither in the past nor in the future. And the living are passengers already touching the edge of what’s next.
 
That’s the mystery of these cracks: they are not ends, but passages. And it’s in my relationship to death that I cast my own life. A place where nothing is gained, nothing is lost, but everything is transformed. It’s chemistry. It just changes form. And now, it’s a painting. It’s another step, another breath, an inevitable unfolding from life itself.