Artist statement

I grew up knowing things I wasn’t supposed to say. In my body, in my home, in my city — I felt everything. Desire. Pain. Pleasure. The weight of what women carry in silence. I was young and I already knew that knowing too much, feeling too much, being too much was dangerous. So I learned the split. The woman you show. The woman you hide. I chose not to hide. No institution taught me how. I learned the only way this kind of knowledge can be learned — alone, in the studio, listening to the body. I paint the female body because it is where everything is stored. The secrets. The hunger. The fire. The accumulated silence of every woman who came before me — my mother, my grandmother, every woman in my lineage who swallowed what she truly was and called it dignity. I paint thresholds. The edge of the skin. The opening of the body. The place where the interior finally becomes visible. The vulva. The flesh. The terrain that was always supposed to stay hidden. This is not provocation. This is devotion. I believe all answers live in the center of the body. In the sun that burns there — beneath the conditioning, beneath the shame, beneath the split. My work is an invitation to return to that place. To feel the fire that was never extinguished. To know you are seen — not despite what you carry, but because of it. I paint what my mother couldn’t say. What my grandmother buried. What I refused to swallow. Nature runs through all of it — wild, sovereign, answering to nothing and no one. Body and dirt. Body and skin. Body and sex. Body and hiding. Body and poetry. Body and fire. All of it sacred. All of it true. All of it mine. All of it yours.