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Featured Works
Duality
This pen and ink artist trading cards explore duality and nuance, with meaning changing based on how the cards are paired. Set One is inspired by The Summer Hikaru Died; the cards separately show a healing and harmful touch, but when together, reveal the complexity of both qualities existing at once. Set Two depicts a woman and skeleton, and when joined, brings up questions of mortality. The man and the cupcake combine to reference adult loneliness when joined, contrasting a childlike treat and a cigarette. Set Four looks like a grocery exchange, but the fish card reminds of the animal lives taken to create the products. The final pair shows the tearing down of forests into cities, a human standing where trees once did. Working on these cards made me think about the strange ways we join and connect. I liked the idea of trading the pairs away to different people, to encourage connection. The cards would never be whole, unless the two come together to create the whole nuanced picture.
As I Grow
Self portraiture and identity-exploration has become an important part of my artwork. In this personal piece, I explore the complexity of finding myself, and represent how I sometimes feel at odds during the journey. The piece has a triple self-portrait, with colored hands wrapping around the center face, pulling me in different directions. The hands also represent the influences that form me, working harmoniously to make me who I am. The two side faces represent contradictions and complexities I face. As I created this piece, I incorporated warm and cool palettes, to represent the tension between these conflicts. I’m proud of the final version, and appreciate how this piece challenged me to use experimental color schemes for emotional effect.
Sewing Flesh
I created this multi-canvas piece to emphasize vulnerability, experimentation, and identity exploration. This personal piece represents a new direction in my creative practice, as I am emphasizing conceptual artwork. I took many new risks: using multiple canvases, combining painting and sculpture, and incorporating oil paint. I used the string to tie together my different body parts to show my journey of pulling myself together, figuring out who I am. The string is messy and tangled, much like my current path and experience. I physically used a needle to stitch the string through the canvasses, and chose to leave the needle in the art, glued to the painted fingers. The needle represents how I am finding my identity through art, as I explore new mediums and compositions.
Halfway There
In this sculptural multi-canvas piece, I explored my relationship to inner desire and outer pressure. Currently, I am undergoing a huge creative transformation. I’ve tapped into creating conceptual and experimental artwork, and it’s motivating. At the same time, I am under pressure to create art for my college deadlines. This piece explores the desire to make meaningful artwork, while under pressure. To create this piece, I began by sculpting my own skeleton using clay. I incorporated wax, clay, and cardboard; the red string represents my experimental desires and inspiration. Outside the skeleton are canvases painted with a traditional style, representing outside pressure. The red string of inspiration stops flowing to them, representing a block. Making this piece changed my creative practice, and will be fundamental in how I will make art in the future. I loved combining materials, working experimentally, and exploring conceptual approaches.
Body and Soul
Artist Statement: When I was younger, I read a story about a girl who wished she wasn’t trapped in her body. Instead she wished she could be a frog or bird, so that she could jump high or fly. Inspired by this story, I captured the feeling of having a spirit that’s too big for your physical body. The image is a self portrait; the flowers burst out of a stone depiction, cracking the portrait in the process. In my drawing, the flowers symbolize the internal spirit, since they are beautiful and full of life. They also represent the idea of apotheosis, where the body dies to become something greater. I brought attention to the eye through detail and contrast, because it is a symbol of enlightenment. I choose to place less value in the hair and mask, to put more focus on the flowers and the face - the “body and soul.”
Consumption
On a trip to a rural city in China during an internship, the other interns and I were invited to eat lunch by the government. The city was one of the poorest there was in the country, but we were still provided a large meal full of different foods. However, midway into the lunch, many people at the table started disregarding the food in favor of using their phones, and we ended up leaving a lot of the dishes unfinished or completely untouched. I wanted to depict this concept of consuming the content online instead of the food given, with the two characters both doing this despite being from different generations. I hope to bring attention to what can be missed when using a device, and that we can accidentally disregard things that others do for us and the circumstances we’re in when we get wrapped up in the phone. I chose this piece because it’s something I saw in real life that happens constantly, and I hope that through painting I can somewhat make up for the food that we wasted. To prepare for this piece, I took several photos of the food leftover when we were done for reference.
Childhood
Artist Statement: I chose to do this piece on the personal experience of wanting a happy childhood. Childhood is one of the earliest things someone experiences and it’s entirely out of their control, even as it paves the way for the rest of their life. Despite the importance of this period, many do not receive the foundations they need and end up with experiences that may cause them to be affected negatively. It’s a common theme that those who don’t have sufficient time, love, or support in their youth have trouble finding them later on, missing out on a key part of development. After one grows up in this sort of circumstance, there may be a struggle of wanting to be able to experience a better childhood, although it is now impossible to turn back the clock. I wanted to depict this struggle in this piece by showing a figure pinning and taping a small version of herself down to a child’s drawing. The drawing isn’t a real photo because the figure is attempting to place herself in a situation that never existed, and the small version is struggling against it because of the knowledge that she has to move forward and find her own path. I prepared for this piece by gathering reference photos and finding a drawing I did as a kid to derive off of.
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