Artist Statement

I make art probing the duality of the violence and beauty of living in a body, especially under capitalism, and more so when that body is marginalized or non-normative. Drawing from my experience as a sick, disabled woman, my research focuses on the meaning of disabled bodies in society, (in)visibility and the politics of seeing, and the relationship of the sick body to a sick natural world, especially an aging, female body. Though figures depicted in my figurative work are me, this work is not specifically self-portraiture, but a representation of the sick and disabled body more broadly, and a metaphor for the forced isolation that accompanies a medicalized life. My work is also deeply feminist and queer, drawing on work from intersectional disability scholars like Alison Kafer, exploring gender differences in bodily states and health care, and inquiring into how society interprets, codes and treats those bodies differently. I’m especially interested in exploring representations of and metaphors for disability and chronic illness outside of the tragedy framework, building upon critical discourse in disability studies around the social model of disability, and instead normalizing a visual language of beauty associated with disability and the care it requires, without overlooking the pervasive injustice of the cost and inaccessibility of treatments disabled people require to survive and live marginally normal lives.

My materials research focuses on non-archival materials that mirror the fragility and temporality of the body, fading with exposure to light or breaking down over time. My recent painting direction is inspired by opera pink pigments, among the least lightfast, and the nearly as fugitive Prussian blue. The heavy use of pink in this work also connects to societal associations, and how pinks are used to code and belittle female-presenting and queer people, including in medical contexts. I also research more aggressively non-archival materials like soil mycelium, molds and yeasts, decomposition elements that I see as metaphors for collective memory and forgetting.

I’m currently building an immersive, room-sized installation, entitled SANCTUM, that explores the constant care required of disabled and chronically ill people, care that becomes ritual by necessity, approaching the sacred. Using the visual language of religious devotion, SANCTUM includes multiple altars dedicated to care for different bodily systems, accompanying wall art and smaller sculptural works, all of which, collectively, convey a sense of the weight of the labor required of sick and disabled people, the viscerality of many of its more medicalized elements, as well as the beauty created through the rituals involved.

I’m also exploring in a series of figurative paintings a concept scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls the “diagnostic stare,” a stare that disabled people know all too well, with its implied (and sometimes skeptical), “What’s wrong with you?” This series has added meaning for me as a dual citizen of America (where staring is taboo if still practiced) and Germany (where staring is completely normal and shameless), and explores the impact of that difference on sick and disabled people.