ARTIST STATEMENT IN PLAIN LANGUAGE
Read the full artist statement
What my work is about
My work is about how people know and understand the world in different ways.
My research asks how people, institutions, and systems shape what we accept as knowledge. I want to understand why institutions take some kinds of knowledge more seriously than others. I draw from research on disability and psychology. I also study how institutions, including universities and museums, are organized and how they work.
My own experience of neurodivergence shapes these questions. Neurodivergence means thinking or processing the world in ways that differ from what is considered typical. Motherhood, care, and relationships also keep these questions connected to everyday life.
I am especially interested in knowledge that comes through the senses, intuition, the body, spiritual experience, and relationships. These ways of knowing can be hard to explain using the kinds of language and evidence that institutions expect.
I use the term epistemic sovereignty. I use it to describe trusting your own way of knowing while staying open to other people, feedback, and change.
How I make art
I work with painting, collage, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and scent. Making art helps me think through things that I cannot always explain in words.
My process often starts with gathering a lot of material. I take photographs and build layers of printed and painted paper. I collect fragments, move through landscapes, and pay attention to sensory experiences. Later, I return to what I have gathered and notice patterns and relationships.
Sometimes an image, shape, material, or connection feels important before I understand why. I trust that response and use making to learn more about it.
How I use different materials
In photography, I move between close, personal views and distant views that reveal larger patterns and systems.
In collage and painting, I cut, layer, interrupt, and rearrange fragments. I use painted paper, old books, letters, sewing patterns, and organic shapes. These pieces still show where they came from, even when they become part of something new. I am interested in places where different things meet without losing their differences.
Sculpture and scent bring these questions closer to the body. Smell can bring up memory, emotion, and physical responses. The same scent or material may mean something different to each person. I do not see those differences as problems that need to be solved.
Relationships
Relationships are central to my work.
Motherhood, friendship, grief, ecology, and experiences with institutions have shaped how I understand knowledge. I do not think knowing happens alone. We learn through other people, bodies, places, and systems.
I am interested in how people can influence and change one another without having to become the same.
What I hope the work can do
I use art as a form of worldmaking. By worldmaking, I mean using art to give physical form to relationships, structures, and possibilities that can be hard to explain in words.
I want my work to create space for curiosity, slowness, and encounter. I want different ways of knowing to exist together without being forced into one explanation.
I want the work to stay with tension long enough for another way of seeing, knowing, or relating to become possible.