MFA THESIS

This exhibition is a portrait constructed from a collection of things, images, and sculptures. These works examine the relationship between the home I grew up in, the land it resides on, and the body—a relationship profoundly shaped by my experience with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and contoured by the medical experiences of my mother moving through her diagnosis with HER2-metastatic breast cancer.

The house and land endure despite their flaws, and my body persists through its own complexities. Sculptural forms anchor the connections between the house, the land, and the body; flexed between their shared scale and reflected qualities. The works physically manifest this interplay and hold these tensions together in tangible form.

Neglect, silence, anger, and compassion circle within the private ecosystem of my family. These forces—creative, destructive, passive, neglectful, stagnant, and silent—continue to shape my evolving relationships with my mother and father. I amplify these complexities into distilled tangible objects and sculptures.

I reconstruct, gather, and express these composed moments as a narrative that speaks to the shared experiences and complicated dynamics of a family navigating  the healthcare system. Through the transformation of industrial materials, I explore the oblique angles of the organic and the synthetic, the stable and the fragile,  the functional and the dysfunctional. With my reconstructive sensibility,  I deepen the connective tissues that allow this fractured narrative to take form.