Saudade is a Portuguese term that is used to describe a deep emotional state of longing for an absent thing or person that one loves. It acknowledges that the person or object of longing might never return. Moreover it is the appreciation for the sadness that one feels, as sadness is the evidence of the love that remains. As a wife of a deployed soldier, feelings of loneliness, loss, exhaustion and constant fear for my husbands life are continual and unshakable. My artwork deals with the subjects of love and loss, loneliness and hope, presence and absence. It represents how I navigate my husband’s deployments and the recent death of our family dog. My large-scale multi-media oil painting engulfs the viewer in order to express the overwhelming helplessness that I often feel. It is about my relationship with my husband, the love that we share and my struggle to appreciate the sadness that I feel while he is away.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on an average day, women spent more than twice as much time preparing food and drink and doing interior cleaning, and over three times as much time doing laundry as men did. However, with contemporary standards, higher education, careers, and independence are all desirable traits found in American women. Through my body of work, I attempt to reflect on these double standards and raise these questions about women’s roles and representation in American society today.
I dissect and experiment with these gender stereotypes by adding characteristics of traditional woman’s work such as needle work, feminine patterns, and symbols in attempt to question these given roles to women specifically in American society. Using site specific materials such as dust and sweepings from my home with household objects, I create an ambiguous narrative within my work for people to to find a correlation between their own experiences with femininity and my own.
Inspired by the works of artists such as Nandipha Mntambo and Regina Jose Galindo, my pieces have varied in mediums of art such as sculpture, printmaking, installations, and performance pieces but all have common characteristics such as multiplicity and repetition. The use of repetition and multiplicity throughout my work speaks to these individual moments and experiences as a whole while also reflecting on the methodical and repetitive ways women conduct tasks in their own home such as daily chores and personal hygiene.
I believe these symbols and objects parallel and represent many elements of being female. Addressing these traditional gender stereotypes are speaking to my personal experiences as a woman and the greatness and hardships that parallel that identity.

What does it mean to be endangered? To be, but only to an extent? To live, but only as though there were no tomorrow? If swiftly googled, endangered species are “anyone or anything whose continued existence is threatened.” What if you were told the Sumatran Rhinoceros, Marine Iguana, Bald Eagles, or the millions of wild animals of the world weren’t the only species hunted for sport or commodity? Among the human race there are endangered species we often overlook. Society has normalized the dwindling population of chickens, various bird species, pigs, and cows for mass consumer culture. Instead of getting upset over this, choosing a plant-based lifestyle would suffice. However, the media desensitization to the dwindling population of black, brown, and yellow bodies for God knows what, will always leave pits of stomachs palpitant.

My imagery often combines the worlds of traditional art forms, animal abstraction, and portraiture of African Americans.

The damage is done; the storm has passed.
What is left now is all that matters.
Picking myself up, I begin to work.

The memory of place.
Memories of shapes, colors, textures, smells, and presence.
Remnants repurposed.

I seek peace, distance from what was destroyed.
I seek solitude and acceptance.
I define a new landscape excavated from memory.

Paper pulp, ink, paint, pumice.
Organic material, yarn, gold and copper leaves.
Repetitive forms resembling natural elements—paths, clouds, mountains.

Finding balance within the instability of forms.
Destroying materials—shredding, ripping, and carving.
Scabs no longer hidden; the healing begins.

Here. Strength, endurance, malleability, and power of nature.
Form and process coexist with the balance of the universe.
What was is gone; this is now.