This painting is a close-up of Eli being carried on his grandmother’s back. The cloth used to carry him is called *babola*, a traditional carrying cloth that has been passed down through generations in Sikelela Owen's family. Owen's grandmother used it to carry her mother, her mother used it to carry both herself and her brother, and Owen later used the same cloth to carry her own children.
The *babola* becomes a quiet object of inheritance – a piece of textile history that sits almost unnoticed in Owen's home, yet holds decades of embodied memory. It represents care as something physical, repetitive, and intergenerational: a shared gesture rather than a single event.
The composition brings the viewer close to the figures, focusing on intimacy rather than context. Eli’s face is slightly dazed, his expression caught between alertness and sleep. The back-carry position is often associated with soothing and rest, and here it becomes a tender portrait of a child trying to resist tiredness.
The painting holds a gentle tension between movement and stillness, wakefulness and sleep. It becomes less about representation and more about sensation: weight, warmth, breath, and the closeness of bodies. In this sense, the work functions as both a portrait and a memory of being held.
