My artwork combines drawing, painting, and text to investigate themes of self-identity and self-empowerment while also empowering others in the process. While I use a variety of materials where necessary to create my vision for my artwork, I primarily use acrylic on canvas, and graphite and ink on paper. The kind of ink I use varies from inkjet to permanent marker to do my text-based work. I also use block ink to create my printmaking work such as linocut and monotype prints. I’m influenced by the use of text in conceptual art movements. This provoked me to use writing in my own artwork to express my personal thoughts without boundaries or fear as well as express my observations about the world today.

One of my goals as an artist is to express my identity further with my art. The parts of my identity this includes are expressing my thoughts from both negative and positive emotional states, my thought process, and my internal dialogue and how I talk to and treat myself centered around my self-esteem and confidence, and how I process different situations. In my artwork Thoughts and Concealment, I conceal and destroy my personal, intimate thoughts over and over again. The repetition of my process of concealing the text emulates the frustration I felt when I first wrote down my thoughts. With my artwork I’m Not Made For Anyone, I’m Made For Myself, I turn the coin from a negative thought process to one of empowerment. Seeing this positive and uplifting message to myself among all that negativity was really striking and refreshing for me. Repeatedly handwriting “I’m not made for anyone. I’m made for myself.” serves as a constant reminder of who I am to myself. I wrote this affirmation hundreds of times. The repeating lines form wave-like patterns becoming a metaphor for the cascade of emotions.

Further developing my body of work to fit into the context of contemporary art, I created my artwork Suggest Strong Password that showcases the breakdown of randomly generated passwords and expresses my observation of the very digital, technological side of the world that we have today, I transfer the digital to the analog, taking these passwords that I have randomly generated from the computer to handwriting them and inking them on paper. In breaking down these passwords I show the cryptic quality and different parts to a password with the variety of characters used in passwords that we can’t read or understand how we do words, but rather by which we read character by character. While writing each individual character by hand, I’m blurring the lines and spaces between the characters merging them and making them indistinguishable and abstracting the text further, making the already cryptic language of the passwords even more cryptic. Through my work, I also show the multiplicity of creating different passwords. I also bring into discussion the topic of privacy, the difficulty to protect that in this day and age, and how even our own passwords run the risk of being stolen, released, and put on full display.