artist statement

I build from encounters that do not settle. I translate touch, jealousy, exposure, and restraint into forms that hold tension without resolving. Fiber, garment construction, and mold-making press the body into space until structure aches—stretched seams, cast surfaces, worn adornments capable of bruising.

This practice began with an encounter that was not mine and became mine anyway: photographs of adorned trans femme salvadoreñas in the red-light districts of 1980s San Salvador. Brown bodies, dressed, waiting, working, desiring—under surveillance, under threat. I return not to explain or claim them, but to stay with them. To love them. The pull is not clean, moving between recognition and projection, inheritance and trespass.

I recognized them before I understood why—not their lives, but their insistence on glamour, on touch, on being seen.

What once spilled outward now tightens. Excess compresses.

Fabric pulls to its limit, seams strain, surfaces hover between exposure and concealment. The work arrives in smaller bursts: clay, plaster, silicone, iron—fragments that feel handled, withheld, carrying traces of contact, use, and want.

Power slips between adornment and control, desire and refusal.

I press against the rigid body architecture upholds, asking it to give, to reveal what it was built to contain.