Artist Statement

My work digs into the histories behind familiar objects, stories, and rituals, particularly how they have idealized and objectified women and shaped ideas about women’s roles and autonomy. I work across sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, textiles, and found objects.

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I build my visual language from clothing and domestic forms. Dresses, handkerchiefs, dinnerware, and textiles already carry ideas about femininity, beauty, domestic life, and women’s roles. I use dress patterns to construct clay garments, drawing on the sewing and craft I learned from my German mother. I borrow patterns from textiles, wallpaper, and china, and repeat them throughout the work. I also use materials for the associations they already carry. Porcelain suggests fragility and value. Embroidery and needlework connect to traditions of women’s labor. Encaustic can cover, obscure, and preserve.

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I research the histories behind these forms, stories, and traditions, looking past the assumptions and cultural meanings we have attached to them. I trace connections through law, religion, folklore, marriage, and domestic life, asking who shaped these ideas, who benefited from them, and what choices women actually had. I bring what I find back into the work through materials, patterns, and language. That investigation often reveals opposing things that can be true at the same time: beauty and violence, tenderness and control, comfort and constraint. I don’t want to replace one simple answer with another. I want viewers to question what they think they already know and reconsider the stories we inherit about women and their roles.

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I use beauty to draw people in. Craftsmanship, ornament, pattern, and familiar forms can make the work seductive, even when what lies underneath is not. Something that first appears beautiful, nostalgic, or comforting can slowly reveal a much less comfortable history.