ARTIST & INDEPENDENT CURATOR

As a mixed-race Indigenous/German artist and curator, my artistic work reflects on and engages with lived-experiences, vicarious recounters, familial ties and memory gaps. Extracting image fragments from my own photo-based documentation, I use both a reductive and a collective collage approach to the artworks that I create, weaving a narrative of compiled moments into a sort of “story-quilt.” Collage is both a philosophy and an aesthetic process through which I can recount and reflect, and although these narratives are often deeply personal, I believe they present recognizable moments to most. My artistic storytelling meanders through mediums of cut and paste collage, charcoal, and in-the-moment inspired mediums/objects, yet I would consider myself primarily an oil painter.

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Using fragmentation and assemblage of place, time, and space within one picture plane; often even using the canvas frame as a means of considered containment of narrative, these paintings present themes of joy and trauma simultaneously. Using visuals from old family photographs, life cycles of plants, and found imagery of idyllic travel destinations, I use similar visual modalities of overlapped segments and remnants of subconscious thought. These methods of working provide the viewer opportunity to navigate between environments with me, affecting individual lived experiences. Working in 2D series and 3D one-offs, I attempt to build a narrative momentum in a body of work. My goal is to both understand my lived or told experiences on a deeper conscious level while also connecting visually and emotively with my audiences. My emotions are tied into the artistic process and the internal and external conversations of these artistic processes are, in a sense, a mode of understanding and response.