My artistic practice compulsively investigates what I call ‘rotten femininity,’ where the feminine, the self, is worn through by its own ordinary, repetitive maintenance, until it ceases to hold and becomes mere residue of maintenance. Hence, the work performs compulsive fatigue with performing itself. 

The work begins each day with the authoring of personas that function as narrative descriptors, such as “Disney French dogwalker jumps out of the television screen,” “Teen dad finds himself sleeping to work,” or “Career-ending acl tear pushes girl towards executive duties.” The personas always exist in liminal states, always in transition, always becoming or just after, refusing arrival. It is always ‘girl,’ never ‘woman.’ The authored personas, in truth, my selves, often become nothing beyond circumstance, costume, or event. We form ourselves around an absence rather than a presence, an absence of a stable, complete self underneath, orchestrating; we become the causality of our collapse inward. 

Each day, I document the authored personas with a Polaroid camera, where I assume the role of the photographer, the authored persona, and myself; all of which are inseparable. Some of these authored personas play a game of ‘hide and seek’ with the camera, staging digital and analog autoportraits to subvert the camera’s logic of fixity and automaticity. 

These autoportraits become my primary source material for collages. I peel, scratch into, draw, or paint on the Polaroid autoportraits, and transfer digital photographs onto various materials through experimental printmaking techniques. I become illegible, imperceptible. The autoportraits are then assembled alongside worn, fragmented fabrics and drawings into tactile, intimate collages that operate through a visual, bodily logic rather than narrative clarity. The mere act of getting dressed becomes psychologically uncanny through compulsive repetition, exhaustion, and fragmentation, until it ceases being legible as expected feminine behavior and becomes something else entirely. This uncanniness, for instance, often materializes into other bodies, whole or part thereof, and diptychs, which can take two forms: a mother and child and a twin and its afterimage. The diptychs become a container that no longer holds anything legible, working towards a container of residue of residue of residue, coming from and arriving at no one, nothing. 

Theoretical and archival research inform the conceptual underpinnings and situate my artistic practice within broader historical and cultural contexts. I critically engage with feminist, queer, and gender studies scholars. Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, bell hooks, and Donna Haraway, for instance, have influenced my understanding of femininity as maintenance and conceptualization of “rotten femininity.” Visual influences include Cindy Sherman’s investigations of feminine masquerade; Francesca Woodman’s impulse to become illegible; Hannelore Baron’s preoccupation with the tactile, intimate, and indecipherable; and David Lynch’s materialization of a disorienting subconscious over a rational narrative. 

Femininity is done to and through the body until it becomes strange.