ARTIST STATEMENT
Read the artist statement in plain language
My work asks how we know what we know, and what happens when different ways of knowing meet. My research sits at the intersection of social epistemology, disability studies, psychology, and infrastructure studies. I am interested in how institutions and systems are designed, and how their structures shape what forms of knowledge are recognized, valued, or taken seriously.
My lived experience of neurodivergence, motherhood, care, and relational knowledge keeps those questions grounded in everyday life. I am particularly interested in forms of knowledge that are sensory, intuitive, embodied, spiritual, or difficult to translate into the forms of language and standards of evidence institutions tend to recognize. I use the term epistemic sovereignty to name the possibility of remaining open to relationships, feedback, and change without surrendering the integrity of one’s own way of knowing.
Across painting, collage, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and olfactory work, making becomes a way to think before I fully understand what I am thinking about. My process begins expansively: I photograph more than I need, build layers of printed and painted material, gather and select fragments, move through landscapes, or attend closely to sensory encounters. I rely on intuitive pattern recognition, returning to what I have gathered to notice what continues to resonate and what relationships emerge. An image, shape, material, or connection can feel significant before I can explain why. Rather than beginning with a conclusion and illustrating it, I rely on making to reveal connections that language has not yet reached.
These questions take different forms across media. In photography, I am drawn to shifts in scale and perspective—between intimate encounters and distant views that reveal larger patterns, boundaries, and systems. In collage and painting, I work through accumulation, cutting, layering, interruption, and rearrangement. Fragments of printed matter, old books, letterforms, sewing patterns, translucent papers, painted surfaces, and organic shapes retain traces of where they came from while entering new relationships. I am interested in the seam between things: the place where difference remains visible without preventing connection.
My sculptural and olfactory work brings these questions closer to the body. Scent can make memory and emotion bodily and immediate, bringing association and physiology into the encounter. I am interested in experiences that do not depend on recognizing a correct answer or arriving at a shared interpretation. The same material can produce different understandings for different people, and those differences are part of the work rather than problems to be resolved.
Relational knowledge is central to my practice. Motherhood, friendship, grief, ecology, and encounters with institutions have all taught me that knowing is rarely solitary; it develops through attention to other people, bodies, places, and systems. I am interested in closeness without sameness, influence without assimilation, and the possibility of being changed by a relationship without erasing what is distinct in each person, perspective, or way of knowing.
I use art as a form of worldmaking: a way to give physical form to relationships, structures, and possibilities that may not yet be fully legible elsewhere. I want the work to create conditions for curiosity, slowness, and encounter—spaces where multiple forms of knowledge can remain present together without being forced into a single explanation. Rather than resolving tension, I want the work to hold that tension long enough for something else to become possible: another way of seeing, knowing, or being in relation.