Artist Bio

       Art has always been my means of communication to express what I desire to say most. For me, interacting with others and feeling connected socially is sometimes difficult but art is my outlet to convey my experiences and to depart from reality.

       I have always been drawn to the human body human face, but I think there is something more to that attraction than I had realized when I first started drawing. I now have a better understanding that I am attracted to the human condition, human’s interaction with space and the remnants of the human body. It is not necessarily the form of the flesh itself or the person inside it that I am fascinated by, it is how the human body interacts with the world around it. Bodily fluids, stains, and skin have all been motifs in my work over the past two years. A lot of this has to do with my personal narrative of having chronic cystic acne for most of my life and the fact that I am a woman and experiencing life in a woman’s body. I feel as though I am exceptionally conscious of my physical appearance because of my skin condition and also because I am a female and my body can regularly be sexualized. These factors have influenced my interests not only as a person but as an artist.

       I have always loved the work of Jenny Saville, who was the one who initially inspired me to become an artist. When I entered college, Eva Hesse and Robert Rauschenberg’s sculptures allowed me to develop an entirely different understanding of medium and how they can be utilized. My work has developed materialistically because of these two artists as I continue to experiment. I tend to work more with feminine and domestic materials such as fabric, yarn and string.

       For my final project, I wanted to start in a way I had never done before, solely from materials. I let the materials that I collected from my childhood home speak to me and dictate the direction in which my work went. I collected parchment paper, wallpaper, embroidery thread, needles, fabric, wood, underwear and brown paper bags. All of these materials adhered to a certain color scheme and had an undertone of domesticity. I then painted myself nude on the wood, sewed several portraits of women and wallpapered the wood to distort my image. I framed the portraits and included them over the wallpaper and parchment paper. I also took two pieces of parchment paper and made them into scrolls, on which I sewed fragments of the female body, a hand and a knee. After the creation of this piece, the extremely domestic materials created their own dialogue which I believe lends to many interpretations. Because the figure is covered with wallpaper and parchment, it leads the viewer to think of the figure as more in the background and less significant. The underwear has a sense of both nostalgia and sexual innocence while the sewn portraits of women almost seem historic in the style in which they were created. I have intentionally relinquished my control and tendency to overanalyze and project onto my work in hopes it will speak for itself.