No one teaches you how to carry everything.
You learn by watching.
You inherit it in the women who straighten their clothes before they sit down, who smile before they answer, who apologize for taking up space, who keep moving long after they are tired.
Eventually, the performance becomes muscle memory.
This body of work lives in that space. It considers the structures we build to survive, the beauty we use as armor, the weight that settles into posture, and the quiet persistence of those who continue to hold more than anyone can see.
What does it cost to look like you’re holding everything together?
Hiding From Myself
36” x 48” poured acrylic, mixed technique on stretched canvas
Curled inward, head bowed, hands fraught, a quiet moment that feels louder on the inside. The color red gathers and pools like a weight of thought, pressing close, circling, hovering. The body stays still, but the mind keeps moving.
That quiet freeze state where life pauses, but the mind refuses to rest. Sometimes the hardest place to hide is inside yourself.
When Women Run
9” x 16” poured acrylic, cardboard, wire, wood
Loops twist, circle, and spring forward, only to be pulled back into the line. Found materials build a restless surface that feels alive yet quietly restrained.
Each layer echoes the effort it takes to hold chaos together long enough to be seen as composed. The constant motion, the return, the resolve to keep going… It’s also quite whimsical. We have to laugh.
The Misadventures Of
12” x 12” poured acrylic, mixed technique, cardboard
A circle stitched from memory, women layered in time and held upright in a quilt that knows contradiction. “Contrary Wife” sits at the center, where care and resistance share the same pattern.
But look closer, there’s light in their faces. A knowing. The kind that comes from surviving together. They find each other, shoulder to shoulder, laughing despite all the bad luck, the absurdity, and the stories that tried to define them.Around them, the edges harden into something sharper that is suppressing or pressing back. It’s never clear which.
Still, I Carry It
30” x 30” poured acrylic, mixed technique on stretched canvas
Fluid paint pressed into structure. A figure holding a weight, holding expectation, holding what was never meant to be carried alone.
This piece considers the inheritance of that weight, the discipline of composure, and the quiet exhaustion of surviving both. What begins as motion becomes stillness, and what once felt temporary has settled into the body, held in the shoulders that rise to meet it, sustained by hands that never fully rest.
Cherry Colored Tights
30” x 30” poured acrylic, mixed technique on stretched canvas
Body open, legs akimbo, color defiant. A moment that could be mistaken for release. But the head stays lowered, hands tightened, as if bracing for the cost of it. Cherry Colored Tights invites you into the uneasy space where joy tries to surface and is immediately questioned.
It’s the instinct to seek softness in the middle of chaos, and the guilt that follows close behind. The body asks for relief. The mind resists it. Tension remains. What is allowed, what is withheld, and what does it mean to want something more than survival?
I Could've Put You Anywhere
30” x 30” poured acrylic, mixed technique, cardboard on stretched canvas
I Could’ve Put You Anywhere reflects on the quiet violence of circumstance. Traditionally, women with fewer resources are placed into a life that becomes an inescapable and unforgiving sentence. Often entire family lines continue along that same fragile edge.
In That Order
12” x 12” poured acrylic, mixed technique, cardboard on stretched canvas
A black ground punctured with absence. Cardboard rectangles lean into one another, forming lines, breaking them, toppling off the edge. A chalky white pour settles on top.
The layered cardboard, plaster, and poured acrylic become a topography of effort. The architecture required to maintain the appearance.
This Is What You Get
36” x 48” poured acrylic, mixed technique on stretched canvas
Four women together in the dark. Their faces are absent, but their presence is unmistakable. Blue hair catches the wind. Red flashes like a warning signal. They arrive not as individuals but as a force.
This work is about sisterhood, an ode to my own. The women who will show up without hesitation, defend me when needed, and remind me who I am when I forget. The women who have witnessed every version of me and stayed anyway. This piece considers the strength found in collective endurance.
Sometimes resilience looks graceful.
Sometimes it looks like four women walking toward trouble together.
And sometimes, this is what you get.
You Seem Tilted
30” x 40” poured acrylic, mixed technique on stretched canvas
Some families become performances long before they become homes.
The smiles are oversized, rehearsed, and stretched across faces that no longer know how to rest. A father figure dissolves into the darkness, his red hands pressing ownership into the bodies beside him. The mother, nude and exposed, holds her children and the weight of keeping the picture intact.
Everyone knows their role. Everyone keeps pretending.
What happens when survival becomes performance, when tradition demands silence, and when family values ask women to preserve structures collapsing around them? Some portraits are less about love and more about endurance.
The Glow of Misspent Days
20” x 24” poured acrylic, mixed technique, cardboard on stretched canvas
Built from layered cardboard and painted in hazy pinks and reds, this home stretches upward with tiny rooms, crooked windows, and impossible spaces hidden inside itself. Half resting in cool shadow beneath the trees while the other half glows warm and open, like a memory caught at golden hour.
The red door is an invitation into a version of youth where everything felt promising, summer lasted forever, and even boredom felt cinematic.
The Glow of Misspent Days is a house remembered better than it ever truly was. An example of constructed composure, tracing how memory, longing, and nostalgia reshape the spaces we carry with us long after we leave them.
The Shelter I Imagined
20” x 16” poured acrylic, mixed technique, cardboard on stretched canvas
Layered cardboard becomes both landscape and shelter by imagining a place carried within. The place where the self arrives before the role does and the storm outside feels quieter than the expectations left behind.
This work continues my exploration of emotional architecture and how ordinary materials can hold ideas of endurance, memory, and refuge.
The Door Wasn't Locked
Where I Went Instead
If I Set Myself Aflame, Will You See Me
The Ridiculous Method of Bending
Small Rooms
20” x 20” poured acrylic, mixed technique on stretched canvas
Each square became a room. Each woman found herself negotiating its boundaries. Not with another person, but with herself.
How much can you bend before you disappear?
How brightly do you have to burn before someone finally sees you?
When do you realize the door was never locked?
And where do you go when the only place left is somewhere within yourself?
Together, these four paintings are Small Rooms, a quiet suite exploring the unseen disciplines women build to hold themselves together. The body contorts within its own restrictions, carrying the tension between public composure and the private life no one else sees.
