Artwork
Completed gallery-ready works
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am fascinated with the role of space in our lives—how we respond to and exist within cities, buildings, and our network of relationships. Dissecting how I navigate these physical and invisible structures, I became captivated with the moments of conflict that arose from how my identity as a young woman created tension with my surroundings. In German, Lebenslauf means résumé, but its literal translation means life course or life cycle. In its making, this work extracts the conflict that arises from the pressure to perform and the need to sustain. I used this work as a proxy to simultaneously fulfill and combat these gendered expectations through meditative compulsive processes of writing and crocheting. The result is an archive of coping mechanisms—a visual manifestation of the intangible space of womanhood I inhabit.
As I use this work to reconcile my relationship to space, through its large scale, these pieces demand the viewer to similarly examine how they are interacting with it—looking through it, sitting on it,
shrinking below it, disappearing within it. Regardless of identity, we are all defined by the space around us, and work to move from discomfort to ease, from being a foreigner to feeling at home, from existing within a space, to defining it.
Like many other figurative spaces we inhabit, Time is invisible and uncontrollable; she is neutral—neither our friend nor our foe. She dictates how we progress, transitioning from one end of a spectrum to the other—whether we sit in discomfort or rest in ease. Often, she is the only one who can change how we inhabit space. These pieces attempt to capture and freeze Time: the time it requires me to perform my womanhood, to produce something, to protect myself, to prove my value; the time it takes to move through a spectrum; and the power of Time to delete us from space altogether. As we give ourselves away—eroding—she watches us crumble and disappear.