My art expresses the intricacies of being alive. Consciousness is full of interrelated opposites such as darkness and light, change and constancy, stillness and movement. This concept of duality is core to my paintings, drawings, and mixed media works.

I use texture, color, line, and medium choices as well as abstraction, realism, and text to represent different slices of human perception. As a survivor of sexual abuse, I struggled to keep myself alive during my teenage years and early adulthood. My artwork reflects my own story, healing process, and grief as well as my observations from nature, research, and everyday life. Each artwork can stand alone to depict a certain layer or aspect of the human experience, but I also continually group and connect them like fluctuating puzzle pieces building my ever-growing picture of existence.

Though much of my artwork is abstract, I view abstraction as a spectrum rather than a singular category. Making art in-between abstract and figurative corresponds to how I sense the world around me. What does it look like to paint my experience of listening? What does it look like to paint my experience of a sunset? Realistic visuals can lie at the forefront, way in the background to the point of abstraction, or somewhere in-between.

Additionally, how does this experience shift based on whether the subject matter comes from recent memories or memories from my distant past, memories that are hard to access, the present moment, my imagination, etc? As someone who lives with complex PTSD, I understand that memory, time, and present moment experiences are complex. And all humans, whether or not they experience flashbacks and PTSD, experience time and memory in various ways. We can remember the past during the present moment. We can imagine the future during the present moment. We also create memories in the present moment that we carry with us into future moments and can recall later on. Beyond depictions of emotions and slices of human perception (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell), the variations in texture, medium, realism versus abstraction, color, and use of text in my artworks can also be interpreted as expressions of time, including the distinct ways humans experience time and memory.

Writing the stories behind the works, poetry, and reflection questions as companions to my artwork is a part of my mission as an artist. I want to show that reflecting on art can be a method to get in touch with core values and inner wisdom, a way to live life truly present with this world, ourselves, and other people. My art is a part of my ambition to live honestly, joyously, openly, compassionately, courageously, freely, beautifully, and peacefully while still in touch with the realities of pain, struggle, and suffering.