ARTIST STATEMENT
There are very few universal truths that exist in our world but one of them is that we will all experience great loss at some point in our lives. In my current body of work I have tried to portray the concentric waves of anguish that circle around you when memories have the ability to make you sad and happy at the same time. I lost both of my parents during my undergraduate studies, my Mom passed away after a fairly brief but difficult battle with cancer and my Dad died unexpectedly in his sleep two years later. I found that the guilt, regret, and traumatic experiences surrounding the death of a loved one were difficult topics for me to be open about, especially when it involved becoming a caregiver for a parent at the end of their life. Through my work, I have learned that by being more vulnerable about these deeply personal experiences I can communicate my grief in a way that connects me to others who have suffered their own loss. We don’t need to shy away from death and dying - it is only by looking at these experiences directly that we can ever truly deal with them. I try to speak to the complicated relationship the living have with the dead by giving context to objects and memories when that is all that is left of what once was.