A Common Thread

My favored art-making practices are printmaking and sculpture, wherein I experiment with the media and methodologies concomitant with each. In print, I mostly investigate structures of oppression, power, and privilege, looking at a wide array of social justice concerns regarding reproductive battles, race, trans rights, and more, as well as trying to untangle the impact of my residual Catholicism largely via feminist, Mariology-focused lenses. Frequently these concepts are juxtaposed with text, looking at the boundary between language and imagery and attempting to find where the resonance of image or object may be amplified by a thoughtful phrase or where the communicative power of words can be crowded out by a more visual, visceral experience. Sculpturally, I generally explore the female body, in whole or in part, often focusing on reproduction, maternity, or deliberate amaternality. I tend towards solidity in physicality, towards intimate but largely asexual portrayals, frank and often unpretty. By making physical forms rife with detailed extremities and body rolls, I hope to reaffirm personhood and value in figures and choices which are consistently societally undervalued, demeaned, or degraded. Despite this, though, I simultaneously refuse to ground myself too firmly in practical reality, instead choosing either mythologizing the norm or norming the mythological. I also do some work in the fiber arts. Recently in tatted lace, I've been producing a series of fractals in an effort to cohere traditionally feminine-coded craft with traditionally masculine-coded STEM concepts, challenging the dichotomy between the two. I also enjoy the interplay between the infinitely self-replicating nature of fractals as juxtaposed with the seemingly self-same nature of women's labor, repeating endlessly in much the same patterns, until it becomes so overwhelming that the only option seems to be to give up...and yet continuing onward anyway.