ARTIST'S STATEMENT

I celebrate my metamorphic experiences as a queer transgender person by creating autobiographical photographs and sculptures through mixed media and craft based techniques. My wearables, interactive works, and self-portraits build upon each other like diary entries that navigate my continually evolving identities. In this way, I build an archive and recontextualize memories and experiences into its own mythology in a reclamation of my individual history. I foster compassion and self-love towards a former self that I had felt imprisoned within by fabricating a once-lost boyhood for my inner child by welcoming play as a fundamental element of my practice.

 

My work is primarily constructed out of textiles and beads to recall sensations of play and evoke a sense of familiarity and comfort as these are the materials I loved playing with as a child. I reimagine my childhood memorabilia into sculptural forms through a self-taught method of “freestyle stitching”. This technique directly correlates to play and queerness; it reimagines ways to exist and create outside of predetermined societal expectations as a form of resistance.

 

Understanding both play and queerness as spaces that don’t adhere to social conventions, I get to represent myself as a way to bear witness and illustrate narratives that often go unseen, unrecognized, and suppressed. I document my gender transition in an ongoing reconceptualization of previous self-portraits where I reinvent myself into toy-inspired sculptures. By anthropomorphizing myself, I lean further into the queering of my body, claiming agency of what is seen as a spectacle by cis-hetero-normative society.

 

My sculptural self-portraits extend into a series of family portrait photographs to use photography as a method of documentation and a fabrication of reality in a queering of time, family, and legacy. Through the act of “dressing-up,” my wearable sculptures encourage uninhibited self-expression. As both subject and armature, I center the body as a site of vulnerability and relatability while building a novel mythology for my hybridized creatures and self-commemorative work.