Artist Statement

My art comes from feelings of weakness, a desire for stability and control, and the want for a stronger personal voice.  Through photography I have found my voice and a visual outlet that makes the private and personal experiences I have gone through more public, though I do draw on universal themes as well.  I work with socially taboo subjects that often carry stigmas.  My presentation of my artwork revolving these themes is done in a way that makes the viewer stop, look, then realize the underlying motifs.  In presenting my artwork in a personal yet universal way, it is my hope that viewers realize that any person can potentially can go through a trying or traumatic situation rather than having a mindset that it is an isolated event.  In doing so, this will allow for sympathy and empathy.    

The matters I can personally relate to and represent have to do with mental health, eating disorders, sexual assault, feminism, gender and sexual orientation, and family dynamic.  I use my art as a means to make myself comfortably vulnerable.  The emotions conveyed are raw, giving the opportunity for anyone who looks at my work to have a deep emotional reaction; similar to the experience I had while in the process of creating.  I am inspired by photographers Lauren Kelly and Amanda Charchian. Lauren Kelly’s Echos gives a voice to women who have survived sexual trauma, a topic I work with often myself, while simultaneously incorporating text.  The way she used text was the influence for how I used it in my Sanctuary series, which represents people in the LGBTQIA+ community and places they feel comfortable being themselves and out.  Amanda Charchian can be considered a contemporary feminist photographer who follows a philosophy she calls the “pheromone hotbox” that I have begun to incorporate into my own art; in her words, the concept is “the specific idea of what happens when a woman photographs another woman intimately, and the biologically confounded processes our pheromones go through during that time.”

Through my undergraduate major in photography, as well as my second major in psychology, I find that noticing the way people act and interact is a second nature for me.  I also habitually have a system or structure, relating to a more research-based psychology I have studied, so to introduce a visually and compositionally simplistic piece mirrors this.  Including text with image allows me to include an additional and reinforcing aspect of my work that I want the viewer to specifically focus on. 

I feel no need to censor my experiences and the nature of them; if I were to, it would be untrue and end up being hurtful rather than helpful in the overall healing process.  My experiences and past do not define my person, but they have helped mold me into who I am today.  I find that the creation of art around these topics has led to the betterment of myself in more than one way, and is one of the overarching factors in the reasoning behind my motivation to pursue a career in art therapy.  I am currently in attendance at graduate school to eventually become a licensed practitioner in the field; I want to be able to help others the way it took me years to start to heal myself, only because I was fortunate enough to have the resources to do so.