Artist Statement

My work considers how domestic objects, stories, and rituals have been used to define, idealize, and objectify women. Working across sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, textiles, and found objects, I transform familiar forms into metaphors for the female body, identity, and lived experience.

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Domestic labor and material traditions are embedded in the way I make. I use dress patterns to construct clay garments, drawing on the sewing and craft I learned from my German mother. Patterns borrowed from textiles, wallpaper, china, and clothing repeat throughout the work, connecting beauty with expectation and comfort with constraint. Materials carry meaning as well: porcelain evokes fragility and value; embroidery and needlework draw from traditions of women’s labor; encaustic creates a veil that shifts an object toward memory, uncertainty, and interior experience.

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Historical research and lived experience often lead me to the same questions. I look for recurring patterns across folklore, religion, law, marriage, decorative arts, and domestic life, particularly the ways ideas about womanhood are passed from one generation to another and become so familiar that they can appear natural or inevitable.

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I don’t want the work to illustrate those histories or explain them. Instead, I bring objects, symbols, and fragments of language into proximity and allow meaning to emerge through their relationships. A porcelain handkerchief, a wedding vow, a fairy-tale shoe, or a familiar phrase can carry beauty and violence, tenderness and control, at the same time.

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Seduction is an important strategy in my work. Craftsmanship, ornament, pattern, and familiar forms invite the viewer closer. What first appears beautiful, nostalgic, or comforting can gradually become unsettling, revealing the expectations and histories embedded within it.