As an artist, I am very interested in how individuals use their own bodies as conduits for communication. I often think about my own history of expressing complex emotions within the relationship that I have with my own physical form. Rather than speak of my feelings, I have often used my body to communicate to people that I was sad and emotionally unwell, happy and at peace, or anxious and unsettled. Protruding collar bones and space, thick as a fist, between thighs, for example, was at one time a signifier of my inner state and more accessible than any verbalization of how I was really feeling.

 

However, in my experiences in life, I have learned that the body is not always a sufficient means of communication for my emotions. The body offers a vague lexicon--protruding bones, sunken cheeks, and deflated chests often go unseen. The sadness one wants conveyed through an emaciated form, or sullen eyes, or furrowed brow may not be clear to others. So often, people disregard the language of the body.

 

In art, however, the language of the body becomes more discernable. While the physical form of a person is not always the most reliable communicator in real life, it possesses immense capacity to communicate emotion in the sphere of art. Thus, my artwork deals with bodies, skin, and bone. I can make the fictional bodies on the two-dimensional canvas/ paper convey a large range of themes and feelings. When I paint people, I always craft narratives for them while I work. Somewhere in the story of the figure on the canvas is a plot, an event, a personality quirk based on my life. The majority of my pieces are autobiographical, regardless of how unrelated the subject may seem to me. I let the person have a story, and the display of the body on the surface communicates that very narrative with its corresponding emotions.

 

Along with my exploration of emotions and how they are conveyed through the human form, I devote a lot of my art to a celebration of femininity, female empowerment, and feminism. My imagery depicts experiences and feelings that many marginalized people face: the sadness of being misunderstood because of gender expressions, the bonds built amongst females as they age, the celebrations of authentic self-expression, and the fragility that remains in the heart of a survivor of trauma. The subjects in my paintings—most often women—become agential in the ways they can express feminist concepts of female empowerment, the dismantling of codified beauty, and the inner strength of sexual abuse survivors. As I continue to grow in my efforts to make my art more inclusive, with more subjects of color, more subjects of different races, ages, and of varied bodily abilities, I plan to continue my exploration into how social categorization and identity politics create additional meaning within my art. I hope to make my own personal experiences, and my own devotion to the celebration of the marginalized, as relatable as possible to a large variety of people.