Using bold colors and iconic forms in paint, fabrics, plastics, music, and even bread, I dig for the aggression beneath the benign.

My painting visualizes a life-changing decision or catastrophic event as severing before and after, energy and matter, sleep and wakefulness, inner and outer worlds. Particularly messy are the seams between genders, and childhood and adulthood. Alternate realities and outcomes bulge behind stitches. I create sculpture that forces dualities together, exposing the absurdity of assumptions about strength and dominance. I employ materials and iconography associated with women and children, alongside macho forms like weaponry and the Texas lone star. Clumping together conflicting elements of cultural symbolism can crystallize or parody ingrained aspects of culture. In my music project I do the same, pitting a mother-daughter relationship against traditionally masculine rock-and-roll tropes.

Professional experiences in animation and infographics meld with memories of my grandmother steamrolling stitches through fabric to pave a road out of domestic confinement. The stitches also reference the aesthetics of surgery: the taking apart and piecing back together of female bodies in my family, to wrench destiny away from a genetic blueprint for reproductive cancer. And a tendency for spontaneous and inexplicable episodes of awake-dreaming that dissociate me from reality feeds my fantasy of blending dimensions.

In all these ways, I push the inherent characteristics of a familiar material or form until it nearly morphs into another state. Engaging in a struggle to impose order on disparate raw elements, using assertive paint marks, forceful needle piercings, and vivid colors...I accept and respect that chaos has a bossy beauty of its own.