artist statement
I am an active listener and visual storyteller. I understand storytelling as a gesture moving in two opposing directions: uncovering and inventing, remembering and imagining. It is an act that holds contradiction—the tender and the absurd, truth-telling and make-believe, lamentation and laughter. In my work, I explore this duality, embracing the idea that sometimes serious problems require silly, off-center, or playful solutions.
My practice nurtures intersections between visual art, social practice, and research-based inquiry. Working across drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, installation, photography, and time-based media, I approach each medium as a way to translate listening into form. The studio becomes a site for mapping relations between body, memory, and landscape, spaces where cultural, political, and personal geographies overlap. Recurring themes in my work include care, belonging, dissonant heritage, and the politics of place and memory. Through these lenses, I have been exploring the notion of memoryscapes: spatial representations of socially shared memory; listening as cartography; and mapping the entanglements of past and present cultural terrains.
Parallel to my studio practice, my background in education, community building, cross-cultural dialogue, and leadership development shapes the way I approach art as a collective process. In my work with Humanity in Action, an international leadership organization rooted in democratic values, I design and hold spaces for gathering, learning, skill-sharing, reflection, and creative collaboration. These experiences continue to inform my curiosity about how we might de-stigmatize, unlearn, and re-map our ways of seeing, and how we can reimagine belonging and empathy from the ground up.
I see art as both mirror and meeting place, a way to humanize what has been made distant and to recenter the margins as vital to our shared consciousness. I am drawn to creating spaces (visual, physical, and emotional) that invite contemplation, listening, rest, play, and care as acts of quiet resistance to a culture of overstimulation and overwhelm. Whether within the four edges of a composition or within a circle of conversation, I am interested in constructing constellations of experience: painterly textures, fragmented stories, and overlapping voices that hold both transparency and mystery. My work, in its many forms, is an invitation to dwell in complexity, to look, listen, and imagine together.