P O R T F O L I O

My art is rooted in fragmented duality. Abstraction allows me to balance oppositional elements, creating surface tension. In Suminagashi - the ancient Japanese art of floating ink - I  bend ink on the water’s surface creating patterns of color we cannot reproduce. In abstract collage I get to do the same, incorporating gestural mark making, asemic writing, watercolor inks, paper scraps, and sumi paper to make a style of collage that feels uniquely my own. 

Finishing my collages often includes scraping the surface of the paper adding imperfection, erasing pencil lines messily, gluing trash or pencil shavings into the art or using splashes of paint to draw the eye in towards easily missed details.  

Collaging feels like bending time and energy, creating conflict with paper and stability by piecing them back together. Fragments made to fit despite difference, in texture, size, pattern and color. My artistic style balances sharp contrast with hyper pigmented bursts of color, flowing patterns with geometrical cut outs, wrinkles and tears with gestural scratches and thick curving lines. 

The work I make correlates directly with the complexity of my life experiences. It has provided me comfort and safety moving through impossibility. Hope when there was almost none. Conceptually my work illustrates how my racial identity, disabilities, gender and sexuality, and my survival needs clash with the way I am perceived in the world, the way I struggle to be embraced. I am deeply sensitive, emotionally complex, and evolving. My work is a bid for connection and a representation of me moving through the world - colorful, surprising, sometimes harsh, but full of light.