I have an eating disorder.
With it comes the struggle of expectations, responsibility, confidence, being seen, being worthy, taking up space, waste, money, freedom, consumption and much more. These challenges have led me to my art.
But my work has grown beyond personal healing into something larger—community building, cultural production, and making space for other voices that have been marginalized or overlooked. How can I make more space for myself physically and mentally? This question evolved into: How can we make more space for each other? How do we create community where vulnerability becomes strength, where struggle becomes connection?
My multidisciplinary practice began with large-scale abstract paintings where I poured, dripped, and blow-dried paint into "ordered chaos," then outlined each drip to contain the wildness. Now I cut up these old paintings along with photographs and historical documents, transforming destruction into reconstruction. These fragments become new sculptures and installations where others participate in the rebuilding process.
My "Imaginary Wall" installations use thousands of colorful dots applied with community participation to visualize invisible barriers while simultaneously deconstructing them. Each dot represents a moment of possibility, a crack in what holds us back. The wall isn't just personal—it's built from the contradictions of being an artist who needs to survive while creating work that critiques the very systems demanding commodification.
Through my "Perceive Me" performance project, I become artist, curator, and muse, challenging society's perceptions of bodies like mine. Collaborating with other artists and using photography, digital avatars, and intimate documentation, I explore how our self-worth becomes entangled with how others see us. The project examines what it means to be seen, to take up space, to exist unapologetically when we're constantly viewing ourselves through others' eyes in a world that tells plus-size women we shouldn't.
As founder of Shoebox Arts and founder of the nonprofit January Arts (now publisher of Art and Cake magazine), I extend my creative practice beyond the studio. These platforms are not separate from my art—they ARE my art. Through mentorship programs, artist support networks, and amplifying underrepresented voices, community building becomes my artistic practice. My work as curator and mentor reflects my belief that making space for yourself is incomplete without making space for others.
By shredding, organizing and consolidating my history I am making room—not just for myself, but for the artists, stories, and voices that deserve platforms. What does it mean to hold on to things, to ideas, to memories, to feelings? What does it mean to possess? To collect? What does it mean to be precious? What does it mean to live in the present?
This is my clean slate. My way of letting go of the past, living in the present, and learning to accept myself—and support others in accepting themselves—as we are. Through dots and drips, community and collaboration, destruction and reconstruction, I continue to make space. Space to breathe, space to create, space to connect, space to heal—together.