SketchesAndRenderings

Studio Art

"My Studio Work exists as a direct response to my chosen career. As designers, we often are expected to swallow our own voices and experiences to be more versatile and marketable. For me, that meant that I lost my voice, and on some level my identity. At a time when I was feeling particularly out of touch, I began taking self-portraits in environments that made me happy for reasons I could not fully understand. This evolved into a series of paintings, and an autobiographical sketchbook. There is absolutely an element of self-indulgence to creating art almost exclusively using your own face, but when much of your creative work is about telling other people's stories in the most palatable way possible (often eliminating ideas, impulses, or stories about the lived experiences of queer people) I think that taking time to literally look yourself in the eye and make space for yourself is not only valuable, it's essential."