Statement

My work examines the impacts of rape on the mind, body, and imagination. My freshman year of college, I was raped only two months after arriving at school. It took me a year to tell my sister, another six months to tell my parents, another year to tell my peers, and only last week did I begin to tell my full story. 

I work with drawing, printmaking, fiber, and writing. 

My drawings are literal. They examine the warped reality I experienced when I was suffering with PTSD. I visualize my dreams, try to give voice to the most intimate parts of my experience, and make visible everything I saw that no one else could see. Whether that be handprints on my body from where I was touched, rockets and fireworks shooting towards my eyes and my brain as I try to wash dishes, dark shadows of men creeping around my room as I sleep, or binding myself to the roots of vegetables under an oppressive and phallic garden - I don’t give into the idea that these imaginations aren’t real. When I was suffering the most, I was made to feel insane - but my thoughts were so strong they couldn’t help but manifest as real images. Flashes of stories I conjured in my passing thoughts revealed themselves to me in full. The vividness makes them real to my nervous system. Drawing these horrors as reality is essential to validating the experience of fear survivors with PTSD become accustomed to. 

My fiber work examines time and coping. The act of embroidering forces me to meditate with imagery, to ponder the rage and repressed emotions survivors of sexual violence are burdened with hiding. Knitting is meditation. It is experimentation. I never use patterns, I don’t plan ahead. The sweaters I knit are born from my impulse to comfort myself, see the trail of labor I leave in each stitch, to give myself an expression of color and warmth. Knitting garments has become an essential part of my written and illustrative practice - it is the time I use to reflect upon the experiences that have changed me most. Knitting acts as the regulator, the tool that allows me to dive deep in my brain, to scream into the void without falling off the cliff. 

Printmaking is my hard labor. It is my challenge. I printmake when I need the marks or lines of a drawing to take life of their own. To be proof of not only my hand, but my whole body. Printmaking forces me to spend hours destroying, changing, building a surface. My 1/1 linocuts are arduous and thankless. They take my energy and my muscles to create, they don’t get to be multiplied the way my other prints do. They are complex and deeply thought out. Prints force me to plan in a way that I never do with drawing, force me to let go of the idea I started with because prints never come out how we want them to. Prints don’t let me stay comfortable. They serve me well when I need to break my boundaries, challenge my ideas, be born again out of a rage to survive. 

My writing is clear, it is honest, it is accessible. I recently started the website killyourrapist.net to give space to survivors of sexual violence for anonymous art and writing. I contribute essays with my name, give my vulnerability and rage to the space in order to give it foundation. The written account of my rape, the realities I never spoke about in the previous five years I’ve been making this work, is the first submission on the website. It has given womxn and men from all walks of life the power to write their own experiences down, given them space to scream. I use my writing to connect with people who have been left in the dust by their peers, left to suffer in silence, for that is something I used to know well. The website and my writing is where my work becomes collaborative, where it becomes a part of something larger than myself and my singular experience. 

My work as a whole has always tracked my current perception of my life. It is a reflection of myself and my surroundings, a timeline being forever built upon across medium and usage. My practice swims between works that can be used and worn to works that can be read and viewed. I don’t restrict myself within the confines of the medium. Instead, I build upon the subject. I read, I write, I listen to other people's lives and document how it changes my own. The purpose of my work is to let people hear me so they can also be heard. There is nothing about my work that is happening in secret only for me to know. It is for the masses, for the people, for change.