I paint the female body in states of transformation—pregnancy, birth, postpartum—to show the visceral realities of motherhood. I want to know how this experience consumes, ruptures, and remakes the self. I’m drawn to the concept of the monstrous feminine—the reproductive body as both feared and revered, volatile, leaking, and uncontrollable.
Growing up on a cranberry farm in Massachusetts, I was immersed in a landscape shaped by cycles of fertilization, growth, and harvest—rhythms that have seeped into my work. Cranberry imagery becomes a metaphor for the reproductive body: swollen, fertile, bleeding. The harvest depends on flooding, echoing my fascination with containment and permeability. I think about the body as a vessel that refuses to be sealed, always in flux.
I often use my own body as a model, staging performances for the camera to explore both personal and archetypal imagery. I reference folklore and classical mythology, reinterpreting figures whose transformations mirror the physical and psychological shifts of motherhood. These mythic bodies—shifting, splitting, mutating—speak to the instability of identity that accompanies matrescence. My materials embody this fluidity: I use acrylic inks on translucent drafting film, allowing the paint to pool, bleed, and stain.
Through these paintings, I confront the contradictions of motherhood—its tenderness and violence, power and erasure, creation and consumption—an experience that is both universal and deeply personal.