I’m a New York City based artist and Pratt Institute graduate. I’m currently looking for representation.
My work is an exploration of internal body parts and the relationship between the hidden and the seen as they develop and converge with one another. Painted on different found household objects’ surfaces and canvas, my paintings are visceral, wet, and shiny, depicting tension, tearing, and movement. I use the texture of the paint to embody blood and viscera in addition to depicting it. The subjects portrayed correlate to emotional experiences and specifically explore what it means and feels like to inhabit a female body. Birth and motherhood are another iteration of these internal-external relationships in my work. I am interested in investigating these themes in ways that diverge from the male gaze and cultural/religious idealizations of these experiences. More broadly, my paintings are about the nature of constant change of everything around us and inside us, including the changes and trauma our bodies undergo, and how beautiful, overwhelming, and painful it is to be subjected to the constant cycles of birth, development, and deterioration.
Recently I’ve been making paintings influenced by images from medical and veterinary archives. What drew me to these images was their mystery, grotesqueness and beauty. I think about how these internal parts of the body correlate to internal emotional experiences as our minds and bodies constantly tear and heal as we are born, age, and die.
The relationship between the internal and the external as they develop and converge with one another fascinates me. I’m interested in the moment where the inside of the mouth meets the lip; with how feelings become thoughts, which then become movements, words, or marks and eventually paintings. How the internal and external are so intertwined and ultimately the same pulsing thing; but simultaneously so distinct. How internal things gestate and are invariably birthed, over and over again.
The constant cycles and patterns of feelings and experiences, and how everyone undergoes them similarly but often at different times and alone fascinates me. How personal internal experiences externalize to become public and possibly collective – and how they can be collective while still being hidden and internal – and how painting can be a mode of collectivizing these experiences – or of letting the viewer know their experience may be a collective one, even if felt only internally.
What moves me to paint is the intensity and aloneness I have felt in the face of life events and emotions. Painting has come from a need to be still and connect to emotions and thoughts by translating them into tangible images and separating them from myself; as a way for me to understand myself and how I’m a part of my environment and others around me. I want my paintings to move others to feel their emotions and fears and to feel connected to one another in feeling them, as this seems to be the most essential part about being human.