I was raised in an MRI. Black and white images emblazoned on a screen, containing slices of people’s insides, populate my childhood memories. I remember being transfixed each time my father would scroll back and forth on a series of images, breathing life into the layered snapshots of each body part as he searched for the cause of someone’s pain. This pursuit for answers hidden within the body is my personal heritage and the driving force behind my artistic practice. 

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Up until very recently, my body has not felt like mine. Historically, it has been a fleshy cage that I allow existence out of necessity. Deep discomfort emanates from my breasts and internal organs; they are parts of my body that I feel I have little control over and align me with an identity I do not feel comfortable in. However, all of these experiences have gone largely unnamed and unnoticed throughout the majority of my life. I have not known how to listen to my body or identify where my feelings physically manifest. It has been too painful to feel these things in a body that does not reflect how I understand myself, which is outside the gender binary altogether. 

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My body used to be something that I feared and neglected; now it is something I am fiercely curious about and want to discover comfort within. Through the creation of my work, I am grounded in my body. With each stitch, pinch, and pour I am reconnecting with parts of myself I have long dissociated from. My sculptures, pots, and wall hangings hold multiple–often contradictory–truths simultaneously: grotesqueness and beauty, delicacy and violence, detachment and intimacy, hard and soft, masc and femme. I am discovering beauty in my viscera and exploring the malleability of my flesh and biology that I was unable to recognize before. There is so much elegance in human anatomy and in my mind it is able to exist outside the performance of gender that our holistic bodies often have to participate in.

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Exploring queerness is at the core of all my bodies of work and the materials I choose further this pursuit. I find myself drawn to traditional craft materials and methods like ceramics and fibers because they both historically occupy the liminal space between function and decoration. With each vessel, I am queering what it means to be functional and creating a surrogate body for the user to examine their understanding of intimacy. Ceramic dishes are as ubiquitous as cis-heteronormativity in western society; to me they also conflate the daily ritual of eating and drinking with the often ritualistic performance of our identities. Crocheted lace is a material seen by most as antiquated, outside of cultural relevance, maybe even useless–although doilies serve a function and were once just as commonplace as ceramics in the home. I see a correlation between this cultural attitude toward doilies and their roots in feminine labor and domestic craft. To me, it is a clear analogy for how I experience my gender identity. Lace is decorative in nature; breasts are secondary sex characteristics that feel purely decorative on my body. Materiality and the act of making is valued just as highly as the finished product in my artistic practice. They each feed into one another, forming a dialogue between myself and the user through a highly considered and tactile object.