I am a mixed media artist from Royal Oak, Michigan currently based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I received a Bachelor of Fine Art with an emphasis in Print media from Western Michigan University in 2020. My current techniques include analog collage, hand sewing on paper, gel medium transfer, xerox transfer, and drawing. My work has been exhibited locally in Michigan as well as internationally through various galleries and print publications. Some notable galleries I’ve had the honor of exhibiting artwork through include the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Lansing Art Gallery & Education Center, and PxP Gallery (online, international). My most notable print publication/commission work includes Le Monde newspaper in France.

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My work explores the ways in which our memories undergo natural changes as we age and the process of trying to hold onto those precious moments of people and places that we love and want to remember forever, but lose bits of them through countless retrievals in our heads. Every time we recall memories from our long-term memory, in particular, some of the information either gets lost in the retrieval process or our brains fill in small gaps with other memories, resulting in a slightly different and ever changing “false” memory. Eventually, our memories will get so scattered in our heads that they’ve become completely unreliable, and eventually lost forever. 

Natural diseases like dementia can exasperate the process and rob you of your memories quicker than the average healthy person. Regardless of diseases, though, memories losing their clarity is a natural process that we all experience, whether we realize it at the time or not; It's inevitable. My grandmother’s slow descent into dementia has inspired my mixed media work which consists of several decades worth of family photos, letters, and other vintage ephemera. By compiling, scanning, printing, assembling and sewing these “memories” together, I’m able to reflect on the fleetingness of memories, temporality of life, passage of time, and the ramifications a disease like this can have on a family for generations to come. I aim to create a visual dialogue with her about our shared history- what I want to know and what I can know about the past, all in her absence. 

Now that she’s gone, I’m left with only my own memories of her and the now “lost” stories behind family photos/letters that I wish I could ask her about, but will never be able to.