I reach into ancestral stories to reimagine and twist lore into new narratives. With every transposition, the past breaks down; new potentials form. Biased narratives take autonomy away at the moment of our formation and I undermine this.
The work explores gender identity, gender expression, and body dysmorphia by critiquing social expectations, stereotypes, stigma, and archetypes. I use the vessel in ceramics as a metaphor for the body which undergoes forming, struggle, and ultimately transformation. Pinching, ripping, filling, and tactile responses to the clay distort the vessel as if the body itself is being remade.
Utilizing technology, I gather content from open-source databases to directly imbue past imagery into my work. 3d printing, 3d scanning, CAD software, and more are utilized, in tandem, with ceramic processes. With the content gathered, I combine them through layering, obfuscation, and mark-making.
These chimeric entities are memorialized in clay by an entropic cadence of distress, struggle, and transformation. They are permeated through the heat of the fire and forged anew. A ball of clay waiting to be touched, a thread waiting to weave, a story's cliffhanger. These concepts act as lenses of reinterpretation, building new power structures from old rubble.