Through a diverse range of materials and fabrication processes, I seek to blur the lines between opposing physical and psychological dualities. I strive to anthropomorphize, animate, and re-contexualize familiar objects and corporeal forms, primarily drawing from aesthetics of childhood, fantasy, decorative arts, beauty, propaganda, and mythology. I consistently return to depictions of innocence and purity as starting points for subversive play.
I scour online and in person, collecting and obsessing over found, psychologically charged objects like antique, porcelain tchotchkes, miniature collectibles, playhouses and baby proofing apparatuses. The whole object or even just a fragment, silhouette, or texture may spark intrigue: a shingled playhouse roof, the hoof of a porcelain deer, the expression of a cartoon chalkware.
I aim to conjure simultaneous resonance and repulsion: complicating cultural and social norms through uncanny embodiment and disembodiment at both the micro and macro scale. I am interested in evoking sensorial and psychological experiences of the body that oscillate while circumnavigating, peering in, or pondering my work.
I am not solely mediating on the current adult body I inhabit but the previous stages and scales of bodies we adults all have traversed through from infancy to adolescence to pre-pubescent and everything in between and beyond, even forms of bodies longed for, unrealized, unresolved, repressed or even oppressed. By reframing and transmuting psychologically charged objects, textures, and surfaces into seemingly antithetical materials, forms, scales, and environments I seek to collapse normative, linear understandings of the body, psyche, and the world around us.
Increasingly inspired by child psychoanalysis, specifically the theories of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, I invoke the aesthetics of adolescence in an attempt to conjure a specific time of innocence, whimsy, and the unknown, a time of inner and outer world-building but also a time of world-learning, indoctrination, and socialization, of awe and magic, but also of terror and anxiety.