Artist Statement

An improvised dance is an arc of shared experiences. Each dancer carries their attention and makes meaning within their capacity and point of view. And from this decentralized, multi-sided experience a sense of cohesion and composition emerges. Relationships with others, with oneself, and with one’s habits of attention all affect the choices one makes when tasked with composing in real time. This, for me, is the beauty of improvisation - it asks us to bring everything we know, every way we’ve learned to perceive, and to engage in a process of finding and making without the safety of preconceived structure or form. Improvisation asks for our full attention and gives us no place to hide. Composition comes out of a trust in one’s own attention and capacity to weave things together as they come.

My work focuses on picking apart the sources of that trust - the relationships with myself, with others, and with materials that give me the confidence and capacity to engage improvisationally and trust in richness to emerge from the unknown. In dance, this has meant building work that is mindful of my relationships with my collaborators and creating structures that both honor those relationships and push us beyond our comfort zones into new and unexpected creation. With printmaking and drawing, I seek to create opportunities to collaborate with materials and time. In some prints, the texture has been built up over weeks of repeated erasure and manipulation. Others are printed as water is still spreading across the surface of the plate. I also work in sketchbooks, in charcoal and pastel. Over time, textures transfer between pages. Paper rips. Color bleeds through. Each page holds pieces of those around it. For me, this way of creating form out of overlapping texture and gesture - the accumulation of action and intention - mimics the ways I’ve come to understand emotional embodiment and more specifically my own journey in embodiment as a transgender person.

In all, my work is about time and its accumulation: on surfaces, within our bodies, and in the relationships we hold with ourselves and each other that guide us every day.