Artist Statement

My work is about the ways we feel alive. Curiosity, beauty, disgust and fear. Life is my muse, from friendship to microscopic cancer cells. 

My current work is about embracing our mortality so that we can feel our aliveness. 

In the last four years, I’ve lost three close friends to cancer - all under the age of fifty. Each loss cracked something open. I let my hands lead when language couldn’t, and a new body of work surfaced. This series of soft sculptures carry a tension: they invite touch and repel it at the same time. There’s comfort in their softness, and unease in their presence. I’m drawn to the moment a viewer wants to hug them and then hesitates. That hesitation is part of the work.  I’m less interested in illustrating grief than in creating an entry point that invites viewers to have a visceral encounter where they can feel curiosity, resistance, tenderness, and dread coexisting in the same breath. Ultimately In Western culture, death is often kept private, sanitized, and unspeakable - until it arrives and rearranges everything. These soft sculptures, meant to adorn a couch, bring death into the open, not as spectacle, but as a fact of life that we will all face. Only in acknowledging our eventual death, can we truly feel alive.