Artist Statement

My work is about intimate experiences that are synecdochally linked to larger cultural constructs.  I make relics, icons, and altarpieces for a fictional dream religion that sanctifies the physical experiences of transness and disability. I want to create objects that live between holiness and blasphemy, attraction and repulsion, power and vulnerability, familiarity and otherness. 

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I am deeply influenced by meditational and ritual items from Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism, particularly relics. I want to replicate the process of carefully preserving a seemingly crude human by-product, like St. Clare’s blond curls, then crafting surroundings that distill its spiritual significance into the material world. 

 

Hair holds a deep but ephemeral significance in the spheres of gender, disability, white supremacy, and theology. Its symbolic meaning oscillates between vanity and vitality when it’s growing from a human scalp and decay when that connection is severed and it’s gathering in the shower drain. 

 

Gothic cathedrals are known for stained glass but also include rows of high, clear windows, designed to capture celestial light to illuminate the space. I work with transparent, pressure-cast epoxy resin for the same reason. Its use in preserving soft tissue samples and its resemblance to edible gelatin also lend it a proximity to flesh that adheres it closely to my themes. 

 

Together these media help me express the complexities of my role in cultural hegemony. The precarity of whiteness, the barbs of masculinity, the frustration and pride of disability. It crystalizes the ways in which our bodies, interior lives, and personal narratives are inexorable from our culture and history.