I build wearable sculptures to transform space and the person who masks themself in it. These works serve as an armor against an oft oppressive world, and morph the wearer for sites of performance and ritual. This particular work is a meditation on generational trauma and the possibilities for psychedelia to transform those wounds. Costuming offers a unique way to explore the connections between generations over changing geographies as it gives such pertinent visual cues to time and place. I work with this concept in an attempt to make sense of our entwined pasts, while simultaneously creating something new, and something beautiful.

My inhabited sculptures are in remembrance and are often built as my own ritual of grief. I have always been particularly interested in the “women’s work” of textile traditions—lace making, embroidery, darning, and patching—and incorporate these labor-heavy materials into my work. I use objects that are not necessarily revered as beautiful, but instead regarded as tools for women’s domestic work or dime store folly to create fanciful sculptures. In keeping with the unheralded labor of both the materials and their use, I take no shortcuts in the creation of the sculptural pieces—I sew each piece by hand. The tiny details laden with their own histories of painstaking creation lend themselves to the finished product; these costumes end up functioning as a sort of palimpsest.