It is because of my siblings that I know how to play. Whether we were making our own rube goldberg machines, writing puppet shows with our stuffed animals, making and solving outdoor puzzle treasure hunts, performing amateur acrobatics for our parents, or kicking around a soccer ball while eating a bag of baby carrots, play and humor have always been a way of returning to a simpler and more connected way of being together. Since our parents’ divorce and the selling of our childhood home, we are no longer children with a home to return to. As I remember some of the most unburdened and uninhibited moments of my life with the people I love most—and feeling a sense of time scarcity with them moving forward—I paint in memory of childhood.

“Spaces” explores the interface between external and internal experience, specifically how we hold the spaces and relationships we inhabit in our minds as memory and, in turn, how these memories inform our sense of belonging. Each painting is something between imagination and memory and explores the different interpersonal and physical iterations of home we search for in an effort to bear the human condition. Making this series was a practice in clearing spaces and forging passages to navigate memories, circumstance, and dreams in order to repaint my psychic wallpaper.

It’s been three years since I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and in many ways I still do not know how to live like this. I have tools now—awareness about my condition, the ability to educate others, and daily physical therapy—but they are not enough. Every day is a practice in finding reasons to love and in not giving up on giving my grief the chance to transform. There is no cure, and despite my laundry list of daily treatments, the closest thing I’ve found to a remedy is the courage to keep documenting my degeneration as it happens in real-time and the strength to keep telling the story of what it feels like to be broken in.

Wandering, and the primal intuition to do so, can be an unsticking point when we find ourselves in the tense liminal space between old perspectives and new integration; these pieces were made at the edges of breaking and study the process of recovering a sense of belonging. If we walk with humility and courage, these paths we circle begin to fill in with meaning, purpose, direction, and desire. And when we are led astray—especially when we are led astray—if we follow ourselves through the questions and doubts, we can regain a sense of belonging to our journey and love it as our own.

We are all in development. These stories are of those stunted parts, how to help them grow up and integrate into our adult-selves, and what we can become if we are brave enough to love what we have been through and bold enough to choose the future-selves we dare believe in.

I was once an egg too…

Origin stories are tales of creation that explain how a reality came to be; by using paint mixing to embed my materials with the deep and complex ambivalence in relationships, I built a frame to experientially work within to enact, process, and reorganize my familiar troublesome experiences.

Transitions are the liminal space between the known and the unknown. What is both attained in and leftover from the known are the resources we have to enter the unknown. There is much life and loss to both celebrate and grieve as we try to make sense of the ambivalence within ourselves, as well as wrestle with the dissonance and togetherness amongst the diverse and overlapping communities we are members of.

Beyond the threshold where the inventor realizes the thing they invented is now larger than their own understanding of the thing, there is a partially exposed world full of wonder and secrets.

Inside us all behind fear a common softness hides: yourself unmasked