Image 1 of 1
My creative practice is centered around understanding who I am through the process of making art. Working across photography, oil painting, and printmaking, I create altered self-portraits that explore identity through culture, sexuality, personal interests, memories, relationships, and experiences. Rather than focusing only on my physical appearance, I use objects, environments, materials, and people around me as extensions of myself. These elements allow me to create portraits that represent who I am beyond my face. My process is intuitive, experimental, and often fast-paced. I am drawn to bright, highly saturated colors, bold lines, loose gestures, and visible hand movement. These qualities reflect the intensity of the environment I often create for myself in everyday life. I tend to move quickly between different interests, ideas, and responsibilities, and that energy naturally enters my work. I am especially influenced by the freedom and physicality of Abstract Expressionism, the idea that color, gesture, and movement can communicate emotion without having to tell one specific or literal story. Printmaking expands this approach because it allows me to work with both control and unpredictability. The process of transferring, layering, repeating, and altering an image gives me another way to think about self-portraiture. A single image can change through different colors, textures, pressures, and materials, reflecting the idea that identity is also constantly changing. I am interested in the imperfections and unexpected results that happen during the printing process because they encourage me to respond to the work rather than completely control it. Printmaking also supports my interest in experimentation. I can combine photographic imagery, drawing, color, texture, and repetition while creating multiple versions of an image that are connected but never completely identical. This allows me to explore different sides of myself within the same body of work. Across all of my mediums, I want the process of making to feel loose and freeing. Creating altered self-portraits gives me a space to investigate myself without needing to provide a fixed answer about who I am. Instead, the work becomes part of the ongoing process of figuring that out.