About: In my work, animals serve as a once-removed context for fundamentally human ideas about existence. By using a kind of personification, I can cut directly to emotion or ideas without the interference of the human presence, thus omitting any assumptions one might make through a social lens. The animals aren’t symbols so much as actors and characters. They do not carry meaning but make it up through their poses, actions and interactions with other creatures. Sometimes they even become tangled or paradoxical. Often the organisms in my work pull at each other in some way or unravel and weave together. In this way there is a question about existence and the distances between the end of one organism and the beginning of another. These connections and transformations are what I want to explore in order to seek out answers about my own existence.
While working, I find myself most frequently turning to instances of people trying to make sense of the natural world. Medieval bestiaries, natural histories, and scientific illustration are all traditions I draw from as well as accounts, personal and otherwise, of the queer experience. I layer images to form a base for my work as a way to compile any information I have gathered and as a means to reflect the way any organism exists within itself and the world. In 2020 I completed my BFA in Studio Art at University of Texas at Austin before returning to my home town: Houston, Texas. |