Artist Statement

My practice investigates the poetics of self-construction. From the lens of a transgender experience, my work speaks to untangling a personal inner truth from the collective voices of community and culture. Much of my work plays with the power dynamics of an exterior gaze as it shapes or attempts to define one’s identity. Cloth to me is the mutable material of self-determination; the substance known most sincerely by our sensing flesh; the strongest visual access we have to tapping in with our psychic and emotional depths. I choose to present cloth as an abstraction of drapery because it requests a bodily engagement from a viewer rather than a rational interpretation of pictorial imagery. Working in craft-designated mediums allows me to access the intersection of somatic knowledge and labor. By layering the haptic qualities of cloth with language of economic theory I reckon with the space between bodily autonomy, self-worth and culturally dominant structures of value.