HERO IMAGE
Kilograms
Creative Direction / Styling / Photography / Writing
I started as a painter. I studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where my first instinct as an artist was simply to make marks and see what happened. Painting taught me how to sit with an image long enough for it to reveal something back. But I’ve never been very good at staying in one place. What began with paint slowly spilled into other forms—photography, fashion, installation—each one another way of chasing the same impulse.
My process has always been the same: make a mess first, make it beautiful second. I scatter ideas, objects, fabrics, images across a space until something begins to emerge. I don’t start with perfection in mind. I start with chaos and trust that meaning and beauty will find their way in afterward.
Most of what I make comes from my own lived experience. The women who raised me. Pain. Beauty. The ugly parts of life people prefer not to look at for too long. I’m drawn to the tension between things that are visually beautiful and emotionally complicated. A lot of my work circles the feeling of being too big for the space you’re in—emotionally, spiritually, socially—and the strange position of being a person people either gravitate toward or recoil from.
I’ve never wanted to make work that sits quietly in the background. I’m interested in images and objects that carry a little friction. Things that feel beautiful but slightly confrontational.
God is often somewhere in the background of my thinking too. Not always directly, but in the questions that come up while making—about devotion, creation, and the strange act of trying to turn feeling into something physical.
I’ve always said I’d rather be someone people love or someone they absolutely hate than someone they feel neutral about. I hope my work operates the same way. If someone feels pulled toward it or pushed away by it, then it’s probably doing what it’s supposed to do.
FEATURED PROJECT
Lady Luck Pop-Up
about
SELECTED WORK
3–4 major projects
CONTACT
writer
stylist
photographer
creative director
brand builder
one-person magazine / studio.