artist statement

I make mixed media pieces that explore the futility of binaries, natural intervention, and the malleability of human circumstance. I am drawn to rugged “femininity,” the rawness of gender nonconforming experience, and the ways people carry multiple selves at once. I am motivated by the mind’s adaptability (power). I beg for answers: How can someone exist as both fluid and firm in their identity? How can stability and change live in the same body without canceling each other out?

I work with raw structural materials like metal, wax, plaster, and wood because they carry weight and tension in their forms, and I choose materials based on how they can embody the halves of a divide I am exploring. I care about reducing waste, and that choice folds naturally into my focus on adaptability. What breaks becomes part of the next piece. What remains becomes part of a continuing conversation. My materials feel like a product of the conditions I am working through, both emotional and environmental, and the work becomes a way to move that intensity into something physical.

Across my practice, I return to the ways systems and inherited pressures shape bodies and their subsequent identities. I make work that examines how those forces settle in the body, how they endure, and how they can be undone. I look at how constructs intervene in human life, sometimes gently, and oftentimes violently, and how the natural world persists around and through them. I am interested in the balance between what is rigid and what yields, what is lasting and what dissolves, and how our reality is negotiated in that space.

I want viewers to feel discomfort in the subtle assumptions that operate beneath identity. I urge for critical reflection on the pressures absorbed and consideration of what might shift if those pressures loosened. I aspire to create work that makes space for a form of authenticity that comes from somewhere shifting, personal, and alive.