The body is a vessel that contains the source of what it is to be human. The body houses our most intimate desires, personal fears, and records our every experience. Our history and resilience to adversity are evident through our bruises and scars, both external and internal. The emotional shrapnel we carry within ourselves serves as a reminder of when we believed weren't quite fast enough, strong enough, smart enough, pretty enough, good enough.



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The images we see, the words we hear -- all are locked away in our memory, pushed somewhere in our subconscious. The body records it all, good and bad, burning it deeply into the recesses of our memories.

As an artist, I am interested in how memory shapes our perception and body image. I am amazed at how powerful, yet inexplicably fragile the subconscious is. The power of suggestion and association seems to overpower our reality and sensibility.

Every day we are bombarded by thousands of images that suggest to us what we could have, what we could look like, and what we could be. We tend to forget the idea of beauty is constantly changing and continuously evolving.

In ages past, large, plentiful rolls of flesh were the ideal standard of beauty. Our minds absorb the more subtle, repetitive, and potentially damaging aspects of image culture. It's quite easy to forget about the changing nature of beauty when the images we see present us with an abnormal and unhealthy reality. The media has stripped away our positive sense of self, only to sell it back to us one product at a time.

By combining the processes of printmaking and photography with the properties of ceramics, I am working through technical/aesthetic issues such as multiplicity, layering, and memory/impression of the image. Clay has a different response to the two-dimensional image rather than canvas or paper. Like flesh, clay slumps, ripples, puckers, and sags. It also retains the physical properties of memory, whether the impression is fabric, wire, magazine paper, or an inked image.

In my artwork, I am responding to and expanding upon the effect that images and memory have upon perception and body image. By using social and cultural images from the past, the viewer can observe how society has formed a sense of self-image.