Bodies of Work
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Scraps, 2024
Scraps represent the discarded, the leftover, and the unwanted. I am photographing scraps that my grandpa has collected and forgotten that he used to fix up our home. My photographs tame the chaos and stories this junk and my grandpa brought into our home. I use the images to think about why he always felt the need to build or repair something. Bringing what my grandma considered junk into our home constantly caused fights, making my grandpa feel undervalued. I don’t use these objects for what he had in mind, like sanding something down or building a fence, but to care for them; to show that there’s always beauty and potential in everything.
I bring a different type of experimentation to these materials. I create sculpture-like, abstract structures, and even make cyanotypes with these objects. Most of my inspiration comes from photographer Erin Shireff. Shireff is a photographer who often manipulates the conditions surrounding the objects she photographs to explore the disjunction between the images and their subjects. Sheriff focuses on challenging the representation of 3D art through photography, which is a type of experimentation I explore with my photographs. I find ways to re-purpose and bring a type of closure to these objects, and my grandpa. I want to show him that I see the hard work he put in, while also incorporating him in my ideas as an artist. These scraps that he once used to repair, have now turned into art. Materials that were thrown away and left to rust now have a new shared purpose.
Magnetic Tiles, 2024
These collages were created by making cyanotypes with my son's magnetic tile toys, which I would then photograph while the magnetic tiles hovered in the air. These images remind to have fun, and don't forget to find the beauty in everything.
I'm discovering the limits of how odd I can go before it begins to lose meaning. Questioning whether it loses meaning at all.
Clocks, 2024
My son is currently obsessed with clocks. I think he's curious about them more than anything. Observing his curiosity with them, it sparked a curiosity of my own. My son is only 3, he doesn't understand the concept of a clock, and looking at it from his perspective, I can see how confusing it can be. So taking one of his many, many clocks, I took it apart to try and create my own confusing concept. Taking away the time aspect, I wondered if I can incorporate something used in everyday life, something that we don't appreciate enough, something like this analog clock, within my work, still testing the limits to how weird is too weird. I had a lot of fun with this one, and my son loved the final images.
Forgotten, 2023
The idea behind this project for me was exploring places that have been left to be forgotten. In this series, the particular subject is an abandoned church located in Kingsbury, TX. I began by exploring places I frequently passed by that I've always been curious about, I then finally got the courage to enter this abandoned church and absolutely fell in love with everything about it. I chose my two colored images to be of the entrance of the church and the restroom to the church. I chose to include the entrance of the church for one colored big scale print, (17x22in), because I wanted to show what I was looking at in all of the detail I could, all of the items, furniture, and messes that this church now holds. I chose the second large print to be of the restroom because I just found it astonishing the way this restroom has been left. The toilet has been uprooted for whatever reason, but the curtains seem untouched.
The rest of the photos are in black and white on 13x19 paper. I chose this scale because I didn’t want my black and white images to be too large and distract from the concept. I just wanted to show the abstraction and placements of all of these items, along with how the church building itself interacts with the mess.
Paintings of mine created during Watercolor 1 and 2 courses. I discovered more of my love for abstract through this course.
I learned to let go and let the work talk to me, appreciating the happy accidents, and the questionable finished pieces.
Flowers, 2022 is a small series of distorted photos of flowers/plants submerged in colored water. This is the earliest body of work that my interest in the abstract really showed.