Bio

I paint to give my inner child a voice. As a result of childhood abuse, a part of me went underground and stayed silent for years. Painting is how I go get her. When I’m working, it stops feeling like me. Painting is her language. I build and rework the surface until it holds something closer to feeling than to image. Instead of color, she sees anger, grief, rage, and deep sadness.

The sewing comes later, after the paint has dried and she’s done speaking. I return to the canvas with needle and thread. My hands sew small clusters of stitches, loose threads left hanging, and color pulled through color. This second act is different from the first. It feels closer to mending than expressing.

Sometimes I join two separate canvases into one. It’s a way of holding two states of the same body at once. The stitches don’t smooth over what the paint did or apologize for it. They sit on top, stubborn and visible, proof that someone came back for her.

I don’t think of this work as illustrating my history. It’s not a record of what happened to me. It’s a practice of retrieval, an ongoing act of going back into the wreckage and finding the parts still living there.