I make art to process and play. It’s how I locate myself in time and space—especially when life feels fragmented or unfamiliar. Stitching, cutting, painting… these acts ground me in my body and ask me to trust my hands even when my head is uncertain.
Making art is my way of tending to memory, reshaping stories, and moving through grief or joy with more awareness. It’s a conversation with the past and a rehearsal for whatever’s next. I make because I need to, and because each piece, however small, is a gesture toward wholeness.
This ongoing creative practice is an act of self-reclamation and freedom. Trained as a writer, I’m drawn to painting and other forms of visual art for the ways they reach beyond language. I love creating pieces that command attention—seeming simple and warm on the surface—yet leave viewers with a lingering unease that can feel unexpectedly comforting… like the shared recognition of something you once thought was yours alone to carry.
Embroidery
My embroidery work began in 2016 as a meditative practice, a way to quiet my mind during a season of personal recovery. I started stitching over vintage photographs. I found these old portraits and images in antique stores, flea markets, and the New York Public Library’s public digital domain collection. I added thread to bring new life and narrative to forgotten faces and places. With each tiny stitch, I’m drawing attention to the overlooked, reframing nostalgia with wit, curiosity, and care. The physical slowness of embroidery, the deliberate layering, mirrors the emotional work it takes to revisit memory or reclaim meaning through rigorous critique. Each piece becomes a kind of stitched poem—textured, tender, time-bending.
Painting
Painting entered my life like a lightning bolt during a moment of personal upheaval—a bright, brash, full-body yes in a time of no. It quickly became essential… a way to reclaim my agency, to move color where there had been darkness. My current painting project, Promising Mad Women, is a collection of large-scale portraits inspired by vintage paper dolls. Through them, I am exploring themes of identity, containment, play, and liberation. Where embroidery and collage allow for precision and layering, painting gives me freedom. It’s my place to be loud, experiment, ask questions I’m not ready to answer with words.
Collage
My collage work is rooted in surprise. I pull from my artwork and photographs, old magazines, personal collections, and printed ephemera to create images that are part curiosity cabinet, part emotional exhale. The “Peekaboo” series, for example, transforms discarded images into playful portals—merging found photography with paint and unexpected pattern to create intimate, sometimes absurd, visual moments. These pieces are small and for fun, but declarative nonetheless. They’re part of my practice of honoring the everyday and finding beauty in what’s been cast aside. I also expand collage into motion through short, stop-motion animations made from my embroidery art and painting. These animated collages that play with repetition, transformation, and unexpected moments. Each collage, still or moving, is an invitation to pause and see the world a little differently.
