I work primarily as a photographic artist, straddling digital and darkroom, drawing on design, writing, and performance arts, and heavily inspired by art historical scholarship. I have exhibited at the ICA, Art Basel, Lens Culture, SeeMe, and LoosenArt Rome. I have presented work at MOCA Miami, was published as a finalist in Photography Forum’s Best of 2015 and have published a scholarly article in the Royal Photographic Society Journal (London, 2016). I have a BFA in photography from Maine College of Art (2006). I finished an MA in photography from Barry University (2014), an MA in art history at Oklahoma State University (2017) and one year of PhD research in art history in Belgium (2018-19), which I left after experiencing an assault and subesquent lack of support as an international. I since re-orientated myself back toward my art practice but never let go of my research skills as they serve to enrich my creative process. I currently teach art history and photography and hope to complete a PhD in Art Practice in the coming years.
Statement on Current Work:
For many years I was most concerned with interrogating Women’s Issues, using the stories of myself and others close to me to create “constructed narratives” - staged images expressing struggles with female beauty standards, identity, sexual objectification and resulting compartmentalization of female experience under patriarchary. The images were nearly all purely photographic, utilizing digital, darkroom and alt processes as mediums of choice.
Over the last decade, as my scholarly research has evolved, I have expanded my topics of interest in to include topics in disability, especially female autist cognition, considering approaches to undertanding the self and other, such as hermeneutics and Zen philosophy. For example, in 2021, I began journaling according to a Japanese therapy known as Tojisha Kenkyu, asking if these journal entries could serve as a generative framework in praxis. At the same time, I engaged with art theory and philosophy, especially questions of ontology, phenomenology, and ideologies that structure space, especially Foucault’s theory of Heterotopias, Luhmann’s application of Autopoeisis to social systems and Dilthey’s rumination on time, cognition and “understanding others.” Of course, this all comes directly into dialogue with both western and eastern considerations of Autism, especially Milton’s Dual Empathy theory.
In response to this intellectual expansion, I have moved beyond traditional forms of photographic practice into mixed media and assemblage. I use found or recycled objects, paint, gold leaf and ink, and photographic processes such as cyanotype as a foundation. This expansion has resulted in my most recent works, which explore my experience as a near 100 percent visual thinker, common in ASD. I have begun to gather my own catalog of visual memory and metaphors, and how images coincide or appear in my mind, triggered simultaneously by outside and inside stimulation, and furthermore how this effects space and place for me, residing inside collapsed time.
This work thus exteriorizes the autistic experience of visual thinking, hyperrealistic memory, aesthetic questions of physical stimulation, and plays with the literal and abstract forms of reality vs. fantasy. By making these images, I am mapping my personal “Denkraum” (thoughtspace), an interior place where input from the immediate moment as it unfolds is cycled into a constant cinematic reel of associated memory, metaphor, personal and collective iconography, and autopoeitic tension between self and other when communication fails. In this work, I unify my concept of constructed narratives and portraits with new methods to create a fresh visual vernacular articulating life as a divergent woman.