Artist Statement

     I am currently exploring themes of childhood nostalgia, childlike wonder, and growing up in my work. My goal when creating is to highlight the beautiful caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation we all endure in an “Oh Bless your Heart,” ironic, charming, relatable way. I am drawn to the tradition of storytelling, 2000s-era cartoons, cheap plastic, haikus, and the idea of Home. I often use motifs of missing teeth, buttons, butterflies, and fabricy-pinchy textures as metaphors for growing up.

     I make my pottery and ceramic sculpture from stoneware, then pinch and decorate with slips, underglazes, paints, flocks, and glitter glues. I embroider on fluffy felts with colorful floss and adorn with plastic beads, pom-poms, and buttons. I spill glue and rip newspaper for paper mache. I color with crayons and hang stuff up on my fridge. Through bright colors, collections of baubles, and soft bubbly forms, my work dances in a world of play, empathy, and pure unadulterated joy. My goal is to share my interests with my audience through visual storytelling, fond remembrance, and laughter.

     I draw inspiration from the History of Children's Pictorial Art, and how without the guide of art instruction, they still yearn to create. They create through play, often without any intention of an end. This influence seeps into all mediums of my art making, culminating in a pseudo-naive art style and an unseriously serious attitude. The act of creating is beautiful and the drive is in all of us; I feel as though the world and existing are hard enough, we may as well do something that makes us happy, always. Creating this work is an active practice of radical self-acceptance. A love letter addressed to “Home.”