My artwork focuses on the ways women are treated in society and how those experiences affect each individual woman in ways that are simultaneously incredibly personal and surprisingly universal. Women’s bodies are treated as a double edged sword, they are treated as temples – the ultimate expression of purity – but they are also treated as something to be desecrated, overpowered, and controlled. The human body is a record log of everything that has ever happened to us. In the small details, the way you hold your shoulders, how you flinch when someone brushes by you on a busy street, we can see everything. To ignore the body is to take away a story even we don’t understand yet. A story of how we are formed.
We often see ourselves as two entities, our bodies and our brains, and we spend our lives using our minds to try and control our physical being. Our bodies exist to tell the stories playing in the back of our head, just like our minds exist to uncover the stories our nerves beg to tell. As a human, split into two interweaving storylines, all we can hope is to find common strands, similar strings, visible in the bodies of others. My art is centered on women’s bodies, and the way bodies interact with the physical plane and with each other. As such, I use versions of my own corporeality in my artworks.
Through poetry and repetition, I work to rewrite the body and create a preserved space in which story can be told not only through word, but through corporeal presence. By experiencing a body made in cloth, a different version of “body language” is created through the process of formation itself. By creating a body strand by strand, a second story is created through the process of formation itself. Forgetting is an act of relief, but emotion builds up in your tailbone until you can’t stand to ignore the grief. Emotional potence is infused into the cloth to create something not quite conveyable through words, but each woven body holds a voice separate from sound, demanding to be acknowledged. Weaving is a process of meditation, through cloth I tell the stories I can’t tell in words, and in this way create a different sort of voice for myself and for survivors of similar traumas.