bio

My work is about having a body, the substance by which I know my experience. I am interested in the realness of that physicality which comes to me only through what I can perceive with my senses. By making the body the focal point, I find that I have a concrete outlet to explore what for me is an essential and unignorable question: What is the nature of this human experience that I am having?

I attribute the importance of this question to having grown up with severe behavioral disorders that affected my ability to function in a socially acceptable manner. I was put in cognitive behavioral therapy around five years old and was therefore made accustomed to interrogating my own actions and behavioral pathways from a young age. Engaging with myself in this way is deeply ingrained, and over time has become an essential focal point for my art work.

Physical practice allows me to engage with this questioning in a corporeal way. Disciplined training in the martial art of Aikido, meditation, and supplemental practices like Contact Improvisation give me both a physical and mental vocabulary with which to discuss these concepts. Aikido literally means a way to harmonize energy, and is built around a mind-body-spirit practice that allows the student to cultivate both their physical capacities as well as their own spiritual nature. By engaging with these different perceptual modes, my work aims to visually explore how the mind-body-spirit cohabitates to produce what are perceived as both physical and non-physical effects.

Some of this work comes from demystifying the mechanical processes of the body and nature. I engage in supplemental research about the perceptual systems of the body, mirror neurons, and the ubiquity of the spiral as a functional form. I believe that engaging with and decoding biological processes allows for greater understanding of the human condition, especially when contrasted with headier theory. Physical research and practice gives the theory a chance to come through the body directly, allowing me to explore my unique relationship with widely accepted concepts. In this work, what I know dialogues with what I feel.

I work in three primary mediums which are drawing, installation and performance. For my drawing work, I use graphite and colored pencil to explore physical space, to communicate forces acting upon the body, and to translate my mental/perceptual awareness visually. My performance and installation work expands on these concepts in order to engage the body and awareness of the viewer; to traverse the line between a visual experience and a full body one. This gives the performance a social aspect that is of great interest to me, as this was an area I struggled in for the first twenty years of my life. By holding a space or creating a container, I am able to explore the reflexive nature of knowing myself through interacting with others and how this changes both of us.

I acknowledge this work is exploratory in nature and involves a constant engagement with the present and what I can experience now in the context of the past and future. My arts practice is a life practice, in which my research and what I make is a direct reflection of what I am currently engaging in. My passion for this process reflects my own sincerity and commitment in fully embracing the experience of my life, which has often been characterized by neurodivergency and queerness. By inhabiting my integrity fully, I explore the actualization of the body through the dialogue of identity and experience.