Artist Statement

My studio practice combines elements of dystopia, pop culture, and personal narrative, translated into objects and imaginative imagery. I twist these concepts together as an act of appropriation, bringing new obscured values to the surface. The elements of consumerism, uniformity, authority, and consumer waste are all neoliberal policy side-effects that inspire a political input throughout my pieces. With this political backdrop, I aim to connect our future histories with a dystopian glare of our current society, mixed with an uplifting color palette, to find the humor and absurdity within it.

My identity as a queer and transgender person deeply influences my work as well, as it is one of the first things that people notice about me. With my gender presentation, I visibly take on my identity, influencing how people interact with me and my art.

I have always been drawn to narrative images, comics, and finding new ways to create them. When I learned that I could create colorful images on clay, ceramics instantly became the primary medium for me. When constructing my ceramic vessels, I aim for organic and futuristic, natural in its imperfections of nature, yet alien in its essence. It starts with media input: a headline, a quote from a tv show, a lyric. I take what resonates with the environment and headspace that I am in, and begin to map the concept.

To make the vessels, I coil build and smudge the surface just enough to create a canvas. From there, I can decide if I am going to physically press in objects to immortalize them, and consider what imagery best suits the space. Working with the tactile materials is an important act of creation in my practice, as my hands translate the objects into stories. The physical objects act as unique artifacts of my world, narrating my experiences through my own visual language of color, collage, and queerness.

I believe my work functions as an experience beyond the physical use of the vessel. It speaks to the confrontational, discarded, and the “other,” as a parallel to the waste byproduct of consumerism. I create objects that share my experiences while commenting on current events with the use of whimsical and queer-coded color palettes, in contrast with the bleak and over-consumed waste materials. Through the interaction of imagination, material history, and speculative aesthetics, my work engages both historical and esoteric traditions of ceramics. I invite viewers to consider these objects as spaces for contemplation, humor, and critical inquiry, as they will be stories told in the future when we become the past.