A Mother in the Morean

Adopted from China, This 17-Year-Old Hopes Her Musings Make it to the Morean

By Abby Baker

Anderson (Andy) Bray is one of the 15 senior AP art students at Gibbs High School vying for a coveted solo spot in the Morean Arts Center next year.

Bray’s medium of choice is ink - and she uses her ink-splattered hands to carve out things like crows, towering Chinese skyscrapers – and her biological mother, who she has never met.

The gallery grants three exceptionally promising young artists a solo spot in the downtown St. Petersburg gallery each year – and, much like her peers, Bray has been preparing for this since her freshman year.

While most Gibbs students will enjoy their winter breaks far from the idea of school, these art students will wait, phone-to-the-ear to see if the Morean selects their submissions.

“I would cry,” Bray said, diligently working without looking up. “It would feel like such a relief and a reward.”

Her artistic competitor and close friend Reign Fritz agrees as she works on her own Morean submission across the table.

“We’re working on this like we were trained,” Fritz said.

In an Alternate Universe

The overwhelming subject of her work is family, but the collection is not a fluff piece.

Bray dives into her nonexistent relationship with her biological mother, who gave her up for adoption in China [2001] during the height of the One Child Policy.

“I used to have a lot of resentment. I was like “why?” I felt that unwantedness and had abandonment issues,” Bray said. “Now I feel really calm toward her. We’re two different people, it feels like two different universes... and I like to think that she thinks about me sometimes.”

Bray channeled that into her eight-piece submission for the Morean, painting the mother figure as a “ghoulish, ghostly creature.” The artist’s invisible mother is faceless and painfully thin, wisping away into the cloudy background.

She pairs these portraits with a murder of crows that live in a family-like unit and sister goldfish, carved with phantom tails mirroring one another.

“It’s weird, I think about if we were a little bit richer, a normal nuclear family in Beijing … I wouldn’t be speaking English, maybe I wouldn’t be doing art.”

At home, 17-year-old Bray’s adopted family offers a support system for her incredibly emotional work.

The ink is where she copes, but it can be complicated when coping systems leave a trail behind.

“She’s [Bray’s mother] is very supportive... it gets hard for her, I know. It’s hard being a mother and watching me make pieces about another woman,” Bray said. “I’m so thankful for her, I love her very much … more than anything.”

The senior hopes to go to a Florida college with an education program; she hopes to teach art like the faculty who have supported her over the last four years.

“But right now I’m producing art for the show. I can’t think of going to college yet,” Bray told the Gabber.

“I think my artwork is “inky” … it’s combining traditional aspects with a surrealist feel,” said artist Anderson Bray.

"Family of Crows" by Andy Anderson, Photo by Abby Baker