I’m a multi-disciplinary artist who works primarily in painting but also experimenting with soft sculpture, textiles and paper-mache. I usually start a painting by drawing directly on the canvas with a wash of thin paint working in gestural movements while intuitively searching for forms on the canvas. I prefer to work on a large scale so I can use my whole body in a physical way, dancing around the canvas which is informed by my experiences as a young girl with dance as a way of bringing my inner emotions into outward expression.

I then go in and rework the painting in a more rhythmic, methodical way tracing my hands or drawing a repetition of figures or patterns found in nature. On these recent paintings began to change color and value wherever lines intersected to create a pattern and new images from the existing ones. This recalls my experiences as a child tracing pattern of fabric on the couches and curtains of my home searching for familiar images-often faces-which I later discovered is called pareidolia.

My worked is informed by my experience of the body. There is a duality to the figures which are floating and free but also fragmented and weighed down from the trauma, stress, and shame that is placed on the body from systems of control which is heavily influenced by my background being a raised as a child in a strict, religious, first generation immigrant household.

As a young girl I was fascinated by the mythology of Catholicism and the stories of the Saints, particularly Teresa of Avila and the stories of her spiritual visions. I was fascinated by Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculptural version which displayed the ecstasy experienced by the body. As I got older I started to rebel against the hypocrisy of the religion in which the body is present everywhere but at the same time so much repression and control of the body and sexuality-especially the female body. The control is still present today with the religious fundamentalist infiltration into US politics and the overturning of Roe-v-Wade and restriction of LGBTQ rights. This along with my struggles as a single mom has compelled me to become interested in feminist issues.