A baptism is a surrender to death, in hopes that one might come back up for air transformed. Here we find a murky space for the kind of wallowing that might also contain new life. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia is broken by the death of love and sings herself to the grave. With a bow to the artist John Millais, "Ophelia's Baptism," depicts settling into a process with unknown outcomes- wallowing as brave risk that could even be defined as hope.
