The Price of Justice

The Price of Justice is an encaustic meditation on the human cost of witnessing, resistance, and moral awakening in the face of contemporary acts against humanity. The work does not function as documentation, but as an embodied response to the psychic and ethical weight carried by those who expose violence, speak truth, and refuse silence.

The composition moves between vast, luminous blue fields and dense, ruptured vertical forms, evoking both abyss and uprising and depth and fracture. These looming, eroded structures read simultaneously as bodies, cliffs, and collapsing institutions. Wax becomes both veil and vessel: it obscures and reveals, preserves and distorts, mirroring the way truth is layered, buried, and fought for within systems of power.

The surface holds a tension between flow and resistance. Molten passages suggest grief, witness, and collective memory in motion, while hardened ridges form barriers and sites of compression where human life meets political force. Light is not presented as clean illumination, but as something fractured and costly, emerging through pressure, sediment, and rupture.

This work asks what it means to carry enlightenment in a world that punishes those who reveal truths. What is the price of making visible the violence that power seeks to normalize? Who bears that cost, and whose bodies become the threshold where truth is extracted? The work stands as a quiet memorial and a living question; an offering to those who risk themselves to bring light to what is happening, and a recognition that justice, when pursued honestly, is never free of consequence.