Artist Statement

I am a multimedia artist who works with soda/salt-fired ceramics, abstract sculptures, and self-
portrait paintings and drawings. Through a variety of materials and techniques, I explore body
image, identity, and community/togetherness. My most current work, “A Woman to scale” is a
woman scaled down, who is being sized up by tiny men while they scale her large body. I created
it with the way men and women treat each other in mind.
My sugar jars, creamers, pitchers, ewers and gravy boats stem from functional pots used to bring
people together. I made a simple shape out of a slab of clay, joined them together for symmetry
purposes, and hand built the lids, spouts and handles. While I call my jars sugar jars, it doesn’t
mean that they specifically hold actual sugar, though they could. Sugar refers to small, sweet
trinkets, memories, or belongings that people have. It’s a figure of speech that brings people
together, a pot that connects the memories of many different people.
My self-portraits include a painting three times my size and a charcoal drawing that is life-sized.
The pieces are untitled and in progress, but draw inspiration from Christina Troufa’s style of
painting. I painted myself interacting with myself; judging the way my body looks, expressing all
the negative and positive emotions I have about my appearance. The charcoal drawing features
my infant head on my adult body, questioning “when did we get here?”. My self-portraits are so
large because it forces me to fully interact with myself and have a conversation with myself
during the making process, the size make it unavoidable. For viewers, their eye is forced to the
largest thing in the room. The viewers too, then question their bodies and how they communicate
with themselves