Artist Statement
Image Description: Behind a navy blue overlay, a wooden bookshelf is stacked full with used editions of the Clue board game.
Social connections keep us afloat in times of hardship and grounded in the world beyond ourselves - loving others and being loved is essential to maintaining our humanness. I examine subjects such as social connectedness, family bonds, isolation, and solitude through the lenses of neurodivergence, chronic pain, and disability culture. I use personal experiences with estrangement, loss, recovery, and resilience to investigate the importance of community and social support systems. Through the integration and manipulation of found photos, I excavate the history disabled embodiment, creating lineages to contemporary disability culture and identity.
My maximalist aesthetic - packed with bold colors, abstraction, texture and layered imagery - is an expression of my lived experience as a disabled, autistic woman. Heightened sensitivity to sensory input creates a cacophonous world. And while many others think in some form of language-based monologue, my thoughts are instead a continuous stream of images. Overlapping, colorful forms and figures in my work reflect my thought processes and sensorial experiences.
I am cultivating an “access-centered art” by integrating Disability Justice frameworks and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) into my art practice; this includes creative approaches to accessibility features, multi-sensory artwork, and interrogations of “normalcy.”
Matrilineage
In her essay Patrilineage, Mire Shor writes, “In addition to recognizing the existence of a wealth of fathers, which no sane woman could deny, as a painter and a critic, I place myself in a matrilineage and a sisterhood.”
Below is my artistic “matrilineage”. My creative kinfolk and ancestors. The women and people of other marginalized genders - who have shaped my art practice. I would like to thank these artists for their contribution to the canon of art history and contemporary art. This is a constantly evolving list, that grows along with my art practice.
If you are interested in my work, please also explore artwork by these amazing, and groundbreaking artists.
