"No. 9" Painting

My practice investigates the aesthetics of healing through abstraction rooted in personal trauma. Raised in a rigid evangelical environment where queerness was condemned and femininity devalued, I was cut off from the world, isolated both spiritually and emotionally. I was taught to believe that as a feminine presenting person, I was inherently inferior, and as a queer person, an abomination. I learned to hide, to cover everything that did not fit into the uniformity of my upbringing. These beliefs and practices calcified into years of depression and self erasure. My paintings emerge from this history and serve as meditations on endurance, memory, and transformation.
Each work begins in a state of emotional immersion. I deliberately reenter the psychological space of my upbringing, often by reading scriptures once used to shame me and meditating on specific memories, allowing intense emotion to guide my initial mark making. This first layer is raw, gestural, and unfiltered. Later, with distance and calm, I return to edit, obscure, and rework the surface. Layer by layer, I cover what was once unfiltered pain, turning it into something that both reveals and conceals. Through this process, pain is not erased but recontextualized and sublimated.
These layered abstractions function as self portraits. My art often features very feminine forms growing and expanding. They are fluid and full of breath yet firm and robust. My art also features textures and shapes that are found in nature. The mixing of these elements is representative of me. I paint myself in these works over and over again. My inner world is illustrated abstracted from reality but laid out clearly. They explore how trauma calcifies, softens, and integrates over time. My work seeks not only to represent healing, but to enact it.