The Hartnett Gallery is pleased to present Diana Jean Puglisi’s solo exhibition Every Absence, on view from February 5 to March 9, 2026. Through a coalescence of hard and soft materials, Puglisi’s works in Every Absence are the embodiment of contradiction—protection and vulnerability, nurture and depletion, guilt and grace. Within their tactile forms, softness is pressed, punctured, and held in tension. The exhibition includes textile-based wall and sculptural works from her “Femme Body Cushions” series—sensorial forms that act as surrogates for female bodies, their parts, and functions.
The works feature hard and soft stuffed forms, hand-sharpened pins of differing sizes, hot-glue cameos, and lace casts made of acrylic paint—each part can be seen as the protagonist or antagonist creating, mending, or wounding the work. The sculptures invite touch alongside off-kilter structures that resist it, and mirror the oscillations of hormonal flux and maternal identity. They enact transformation through textures that crack, glitter, and bruise on surfaces that are pierced, stitched, and laid bare.
Every Absence is anchored in Puglisi’s matrilineal lineage and lived experience with chronic thyroid disease, and confronts the porous boundaries between health and illness, self and other, control and surrender. The work’s language is invisible and intimate, spoken amid spaces carved out by transformation. The work explores the emotional terrain of motherhood, chronic illness, and bodily autonomy—spaces marked as much by presence as by loss, absence, and unspoken labor. What emerges is a meditation on the fragmented, resilient, and relational body.