ABOUT

"I want you to imagine yourself surrounded by four walls of bricks. Each brick represents something you believe, or have been taught to believe. I want you to take a wrecking ball and destroy all of it. Not a single brick, no matter how sturdy, should stay on this wall. When you are done, you are going to rebuild your house. You're rebuilding your belief system from scratch, examining every single brick and asking yourself if you truly believe this, or if it was something that never aligned with you to begin with. All of the bricks that don't belong in your new belief system can just be thrown out."

"This sounds like it will take years..."

"Healing takes years."

So I began the work. I destroyed everything. I removed every belief from my mind and my heart, relying only on my soul for the answers. I researched, I felt, I broke, I rebuilt. Everything that had broken within me started to fit itself back together again. 

I started playing with the idea of a labyrinth as a symbol of grief and trauma.

Rather than going through the five stages of grief and being done with it, grief comes and goes in cycles. You continue to walk through the labyrinth for the rest of your life, but it becomes more familiar the more you go through it.

I realized that when I had rebuilt my belief system, I had built it into a labyrinth, rather than back into the four walls that had suffocated me. I built it into a place where I was safe to relive the trauma, explore it, and heal.

The labyrinth is only mine, no one else is allowed into it and that is how it shall stay for the forseeable future. This is my mind, my safe space to feel. At the center of the labyrinth is a vast, round room of sorts. There is about an inch of still water covering the entire floor and a reflective surface beneath it. All around you there are translucent floating cubes that represent memory. Here, everything is neutral and reflection is encouraged. If you touch a cube, you will experience the associated memory. It might be a traumatic incident, or it may be one of the best memories of your life. It may be bittersweet, or it may be devastating. No memory in this neutral zone is good. No memory is bad. Here, it just is.

After exploring the labyrinth for a few years, I wondered what lied beyond it.

I climbed one of the labyrinth walls and peered beyond, where I found the ruins. After thoroughly deconstructing, all of the bricks that I had discarded had built themselves into the ruins of institutions I tore down in my life, the people I lost, the life I lost in search of a healthier path for myself.

I looked out at everything and felt that they looked just as empty as I had felt in them my whole life. A visual representation of what I always knew to be true.

I have begun to explore the ruins, reconnect with some of the nostalgic parts that were hard to lose. I always return to the labyrinth, which reminds me why I lost what I lost.

As the pieces come together again, I see myself as a mosaic of everyone I have ever been. I am the 13 year old band nerd as much as I am the psychology student. I am the cross stitcher as much as I am the collage artist. I am the dancer and the quilter and the color guard captain. I am the man who pursued museum studies as much as I was the little girl who made jewelry.

All of these pieces make up who I am.

Much of my artwork is humorous, fueled by activism, and full of interesting pieces of memory, but these works are the core, guiding influence of how I tell my story. These works are what ground me.