My practice spans a diverse range of media—painting, sculpture, animation, installation, and ceramics—each serving as a vessel to navigate the complex terrain of my identity as a queer woman of mixed heritage. Through these varied forms, I create visual allegories that explore the liminal spaces between my queerness and the indigenous roots of my ancestors from the Southwestern United States, where my family lineage traces back nearly a millennium.
My current body of work, titled Perennial: Stories that Outlive Us, draws inspiration from Edvard Munch's profound reflection: "From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity." This collection serves as both celebration and memorial as my mother lives with advancing dementia. My art becomes a sacred act of preservation—capturing memories, stories, and connections that might otherwise fade. These pieces function as momento mori, not only acknowledging mortality but honoring the living memories that dementia threatens to obscure. Through luminous acrylics and vibrant ceramic flower vases, I explore these concepts with delicate nuance. They are vibrant representations that anchor these ephemeral themes in visual permanence.
The ceramic sculptures within this collection hold special significance, serving as narrative vessels that capture more timeless moments. Their archival nature and inherent connection to earth and geology mirror my own relationship to ancestral land—specifically Sun Mountain aka Pikes Peak. These three-dimensional forms embody the hybrid feminine deities and monsters that populate my work—beings that transcend conventional boundaries of femininity. They stand as enduring talismans, their material existence a testament to permanence amid the impermanence of memory and life.
The landscapes I create are informed by my research into indigenous folk art, petroglyphs of New Mexico, Pre-Columbian aesthetics, and the dreamlike qualities of Surrealism. I am particularly drawn to the way ancient cultures imagined femininity and maternity as forces of creation and destruction, wisdom and wildness. These influences merge with my personal iconography to create a unique visual language.
The geological structures within Sun Mountain (Pikes Peak) features prominently as both geographic anchor and spiritual metaphor in my work. This landmark from my childhood represents continuity amid change—a constant presence that has witnessed generations of my family's history and serves as the physical embodiment of my ancestral connection to place. By incorporating elements of this specific landscape into my imagined realms, I create a bridge between ancestral past and lived present, honoring the deep roots my family has in this particular geography.
The resulting body of work exists in a space where personal mythology meets cultural heritage, where queerness and indigeneity are not separate identities but integrated aspects of a whole self. What emerges is an unusual landscape fostering cyclical connections between maternal beings and their relationships with animals, plants, sky, and earth. These works invite viewers into a world that is simultaneously alluring and otherworldly—a visual testament to the power of creating one's own narrative when existing between established categories.
Through this practice, I memorialize not only my mother's fading memories but also my own childhood and cultural inheritance, creating artifacts that preserve what might otherwise be lost to time. The hybrid creatures, flora, and fauna that inhabit my work embody this preservation—beings that carry forward fragments of memory, identity, and belonging into new forms of existence, suggesting that even as bodies and memories fade, something of us continues to bloom in unexpected places.
