As an artist, I’m interested in ruin. I draw and sculpt as a way to process my fears around the body’s vulnerabilities and inevitable failings. My work from the last two years deals specifically with my anxieties around ruin and motherhood - the transformation of flesh, the violence of birth, and the demands of the newborn. 

I’m influenced by classical Italian depictions of motherhood: the grotesque elongation of limbs in Parmigianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck, the bleeding breasts in Artemisia Gentileschi’s Mother and Child among others. My work is also influenced by the natural world - how wolves, snakes, and other animals transform as they become mothers. I find something exciting in the idea that mothering brings forth the monstrous within each of us. I’m interested in the unusual power that emerges when we become our most grotesque, animate selves. 

It’s through copying and re-imagining various depictions of motherhood that I begin to find my own definitions. I come to terms with the complexity of such an experience - the violence and tenderness, the sensuality and fierceness, and the generative and destructive nature of making and mothering another.