About Me-ART FOR HEALING

As a child, I used to draw on the stone walls of my basement, crudely covering every square inch by using colorful sticks of wax as an attempt to drown out the chaos that lived in my home. Of the countless drawings, one that I clearly remember is made of two hands diagonally overlapping each other to form a butterfly; Something that could fly away or perhaps even use its finger-like wings to grab onto the stone and rock-climb right out of the window sat up high. As a recent graduate from the Stamps School of Art & Design, I can’t say that my methods have changed all that much. From the very start of my life, art has been a means of healing. It is my ultimate goal that others can find some solace in my work, as I have whilst creating it. It is important that I equip my characters with the resources they need to cope with their unpleasant situations. As a visual artist and a poet, my desire is to tell stories across several mediums including painting, stop-motion animation, illustration, and more. I think there is beauty in the combination of language and images, and the potential they have to transport someone to a different place. Those places in my work might look like a cave or even just a dimly lit kitchen–the darkest corners of space to the brightest of stars in the galaxy. I believe the full spectrum needs to be there for healing to be possible. I often go back to childhood in my work; To the time where I once dreamt of a window and a voice telling me, “Even the brightest of windows have the dark shadow of the sill beneath it, reminding you that there is always darkness wherever there is light.” This instilled a fascination of light and shadow within me which I often explore; How both of them are equally necessary in their own ways and how the two work together to tell the full story. It’s the backbone of my creation which serves as a reminder that nothing is black and white, but instead the infinite amount of grays they make. My work dives into the grays of childhood, the way in which memory is often non-linear. Creating visuals for our unique perception of memory is how I represent the individual realities we are bound to. People have been doing so from the moment they picked up a tool to draw on cave walls, just as I had in my own domestic cave, and as I continue to do now in the studio.