My work emerges from my personal, visceral experience of the body, illness, and the medical world, while also engaging embodiment as a universal human condition. Living with Crohn’s disease has profoundly shaped the way I understand perception, vulnerability, pain, adaptation, and survival. Through my practice, I explore both the fragility and resilience of the body, and the unseen realities people carry within themselves.

By acknowledging the pleasures and terrors of embodiment, I approach still life, photography, and sewn mixed media works as ways of examining the body indirectly — through material, texture, surrogate, and arrangement. My still life and diorama photographs explore the desire for agency over the body, and the belief that one’s circumstances can be managed, contained, or understood through careful arrangement. I am interested in how we attempt to organize chaos, preserve beauty, and hold together what feels unstable or in the process of deterioration.

Across different bodies of work, I consider sex, death, memento mori, anatomy, destruction, healing, and humor. Wax, pastry, fruit, flowers, dough, and jellies function as stand-ins for flesh and blood, allowing me to play with the uneasy boundary between attraction and discomfort, sensuality and decay. I am drawn to the ways we recognize ourselves in textures and materials, and how ordinary objects can carry psychological and bodily associations. Panties, lace, gauze, toilet paper, stockings, plastic bags, glass, and cotton balls evoke intimacy, care, fragility, containment, and medical intervention through their implied use.

Processes such as dissecting, pinning, sewing, and arranging become gestures of healing and preservation — attempts to hold together what seems to be falling apart. While rooted in personal experience, my work extends beyond autobiography. I see embodiment as something shared: a condition that connects us through vulnerability, mortality, endurance, and transformation. My work seeks to create spaces where internal experiences that are often hidden, stigmatized, or difficult to articulate can become visible, felt, and collectively understood.