Artist Statement
I’m captivated by the aesthetics of the body: how its contours are beautifully curved, how flesh folds and shifts color in the sunlight or how it changes color when exposed to trauma. Likewise, I am obsessed with the complexity of our anatomy, the imperfection of skin and how it blossoms with color when it bruises or decomposes. We experience the world through our bodies, and I’m disturbed by what lies under the skin. I’m upset by my tendency towards violence against my own flesh but how the body carries trauma is incredible, even if you can’t remember it. Our bodies can bear such intense pain but also such intense beauty.
I paint together my memories that come back in fractured images, reflected in fracted people. My image in the mirror is equally fractured and distorted and that is how I paint it. My figures lay somewhere outside of reality, between evaporating and materializing.
Existing within myself became excruciating when I was diagnosed with a rare chronic illness at the beginning of middle school. At thirteen, I mourned the death of the vibrant and healthy person I was before I got sick and I mourned relationships that would never be the same. Out of this dark period, I started to paint. My most recent series, Times I Wished I Could Disappear, is inspired largely from the fact that I have struggled with an eating disorder since I was young, and it manifested itself as a drive to keep getting smaller and smaller, until maybe I could disappear entirely. My paintings explore this drive and the point of conflict when the way in which I experience my body contradicts my sense of self. Most of my life I have spent fighting between wanting to disintegrate into nothing, but also wanting to create and be seen. I have taken these moments of intense emotion when I wanted to be small, and I have made them large.