AUGUST (WIP)
A once a month ongoing practice, this ZINE series resists closure and aligns itself with diaries, devotional text, or seasonal rituals; self portraits as sustained attention in relation to my surroundings. Persistence is more important to me than revelation. This work is about staying: with feeling, with material, with vulnerability. I embrace the photocopy, the magazine and the printed/cut text as marks that anchor meaning made from fragmented memory over the accumulation of lived days.
ALPHABET OF LOVE, INTERACTIVE & COLLABORATIVE MEMORIAL PIECE
Alphabet of Love is an interactive and collaborative artwork that began during a 24-hour period in December 2020 when I created a small collage for each letter of the alphabet to honor the people I love, some still living (that I will inevitably lose in the future - known as anticipatory grief), some already lost (through death, estrangement or circumstance - known as complicated grief or compounded grief). Each index card has two punched holes that are threaded, drawing from Japanese Red String Theory as a symbol of ongoing connection that does not end with death. Viewers are invited to contribute their own card to honor someone in their lives, expanding the installation through shared acts of memory, grief, and love through the invitation to mourn on purpose, the only pathway to transformation from love and loss.
FLOW (WIP)
This work in progress (WIP) examines perimenopause as a threshold where loss of fertility is a catalyst that reorients identity. Cyclical time, desire, function, and self-esteem are all destabilized simultaneously. It is not just the loss of menstruation, but the unraveling of my perception of womanhood, long aligned with productivity and bodily usefulness. What was once both burden and regulated rhythm now becomes ambiguous state of negotiation that redefines me. These collages hold this transition honestly, showing the relationship between mourning and reconfiguration.
DOS & DON’TS
Dos and Dont’s maps the invisible architecture of a ruptured marriage through collage. Torn paper, stripes, adjacent punched holes all become broken vows, disappointments and negotiations of unmet gestures, small requests ignored that quietly eroded intimacy. This is a visual record revealing how relationships dissolve not suddenly but through a series of unresolved and unseen bids for connection. The result is a quiet devastating meditation on loyalty and resignation in the face of the infinite inescapable bonds forged by marriage, children, shared homes and social expectation. These are portraits of the emotional labor of persisting despite rupture.
INHERITED KIN
This series treats family photographs not as autobiography, but as an inquiry into how these moments function as social ritual, attempting to stabilize family structure. I am reframing the family portrait as an act of witnessing the inherited roles we adopt (rehearsed identities: mother, father, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandparent, etc as distinctions) where I observe the slow choreography of visitation; generations briefly coexisting in a shared frame of hierarchy through their deliberate attention to what it means to arrive and belong.
REMAINS
Made during a period of emotional withdrawal and creative suspension, these photographs are the evidence of daily looking over the course of 852 days. They signify the collision of pauses and inadvertent residual marks. These compositions found in my daily life speak to the material residue, emotional aftermath and persistence of making in the face of inaccessible authorship. Imbedded within them is a refusal to cease, and an inquiry of where art begins, who is allowed to claim it and how attention itself can become a practice of repair.
HAIR, AFTER
This 5 year long series situates hair loss as a quiet yet loaded index of transformation, when my postpartum bodily changes intersect with grief, memory and an acute awareness of mortality. These images collapse my domestic space into sites of mourning and ritual, binding the shedding of hair after birth to the earlier act of shaving my head following the loss of my best friend to cancer. Birth does not eclipse grief, but instead reactivates it, exposing motherhood as a threshold where love, absence and survival coexist.
LIFE CYCLE SERIES
This work considers becoming as movement toward death (either ego death or mortality) where lived experience accumulates and causes safety or harm. Through fetal positioning and intimate framing, these images hold vulnerability and self-protection in tension, evoking gestation as a cycle of dismantling and reassembly. Retreat, concealment and tenderness are not refusals of life, but necessary conditions for its continuation.