Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

I make textile works from cut and sewn secondhand fabrics and drawings, that celebrate queer history, joy, friendship and its historical veiled-ness within the confines of daily life. Exploring themes of intimacy, repression, and refusal, my work reveals a longing to rediscover the past, confront the weight of patriarchal visual propaganda and everyday anxieties by opening oneself to potential, soft, and hopeful futures.

In my stitched narratives cartoon-like figures rest in dreamscapes wrapped in exploding flowers or hide behind curtains of fabric foliage that flip between embellishment and camouflage. Monochromatic dark blues reference nocturnal settings to create a feeling of hiding in the dark (in the landscape, at the disco, in the closet) and grants the viewer limited visibility. While works made in shades of purple and lavender symbolize more open and joyful spaces.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands I plan to continue to develop a series of works that consider the artist David Wojnarowicz’s idea from his memoir Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration that, “there is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision.” In this series I stitch fantasized vignettes that combine cartoon rendered figures and silhouettes, decorative curtains embellished with plants, tender interior scenes, and strange nocturnal dreamscapes in shades of blue and purple.