My work explores the materials, memories, and symbols tied to girlhood. Growing up in the early 2000s, I was drawn to toys and traditions like Barbie, American Girl, ballet, and all things pink. American Girl dolls, in particular, were one of the first sources that introduced me to history through the perspective of girls. These objects and images helped define how many young people in my generation came to understand their identities, their bodies, and their place in the world. I return to these emblems as a way to question and reimagine their cultural influence.

In my drawings, familiar forms exist in otherworldly environments. They float with reflective goo based on film stills from NASA experiments with liquids in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station, as well as open-source photographs, combined with images I take myself. Some of these works are based on keepsakes I still hold onto, such as a hand-me-down copy of The Care and Keeping of You (1998). I suspend and photograph these items, then manipulate them digitally and through drawing. A book begins to melt, a doll combusts, a ballerina’s tutu unravels out of control. The free-floating, messy nature surrounding these images functions like the psyche: a space where joy, pleasure, and play coexist with pain, trauma, and uncertainty.

For smaller works, I gather hundreds of reference images online and cut, resize, re-orient, and layer them in Photoshop to create new compositions. This collage-like process reflects the complicated reality of growing up. Influences overlap, memories fracture through time, and identity is pieced together in ways that are often inconsistent and still in flux. In birthday wishes and potion-making slumber parties, there is always the maker’s intention—the belief that the maker has a say in their future and in what they want. I view these rituals as a quiet form of defiance, offering space to imagine a future where girls and women are fully seen, safe in their own bodies, and free to claim equal possibilities.

The hovering textile piece is constructed from a process of bathing fragments of tulle (also known as tutu fabric) in a mixture of acrylic fluids and gloss, then intuitively stitching/mending/piecing the layers of fabric together by hand. With stitches running through it like veins, the piece intends to evoke a bodily/spiritual presence floating in space. It is an effort to re-imagine female representation in a way that speaks to embodied experiences, while further exploring the idea of the body as an ephemeral, fluid, formless, multifaceted being.

Ultimately, I like to experiment with materials and images that hold their own histories. My practice is about possibility, about grappling with what we carry and finding agency in reimagining it. Through acts of transformation, I find empowerment in understanding identity as unbound.

March 20 - April 10, 2024 | The Art Garage, Studio B, Green Bay, WI