Artist Statement for Tulane B.A. exhibition May 17th, 2019-

The human body is the incredible vessel made up of different cells that all work together to ensure the vitality of a person. Like anything else, the body is not perfect, and with so many different systems in place, something can always go wrong. The way someone looks on the outside does not dictate what they may be feeling on the inside.

In my body of work, I aim to address my own chronic pain through representative figures. The human body is something I find incredibly beautiful while at the same time, I find myself struggling with daily. There are so many layers of how my body functions, including the things it does so well, in addition to attacking its own healthy cells. I have used layers and layers of thin paint to demonstrate this, revealing the original crude marks while having the final layers be more controlled and determined. The color palette used on the figures resembles those you see in a bruise, something I personally have a hard time looking at and signals to me a sense of pain and discomfort.

While thinking about themes demonstrated in the work of Frida Kahlo, who suffered from chronic pain her whole life, and building off of the color schemes of Picasso’s Blue Period, I hope to shed light on pain within the body. While I use my own pain to guide me through these images, I want them to be impersonal, so they can be identified with on a larger scale. My work aims to investigate what goes on under the skin, to identify with the body in a way that goes beyond what you see on the surface.