Forced Necessary Rest

Solo exhibition, Bunker Projects
February 7 - March 8, 2025

I think about all of the floral fainting couches I would have spent my life on if I were simply labeled hysteric rather than epileptic. 

Some days my brain doesn’t work.

Some days all I can do is hold my dog.
Some days I am forced to take necessary rest so my brain can work tomorrow.

I let myself zoom in on the pretty colors and the flowers so when I zoom out I see all the couches that hold my body as it sinks, rests, and resets. I sew on dark, cascading hair because the couches are me, too—an anchor and a refuge. My work exists in the spaces between sculpture and jewelry, creating adornment for both body and building. With fibers, fabrics, and hand-detailing, I celebrate queer escapism through ominous, obsessive opulence, while grappling with being newly disabled.

Inspired by floral couches and the all-consuming ennui felt on them, I make pseudo-tapestries and sculptures that serve as love letters to the spaces that have held my body as it navigates change. After convulsing on a plane for the first time four years ago, every day centers the balance of anxieties and episodes. 

Making is a way of finding balance in the tension between fragility and strength. The tactile act of creating—whether it’s knotting, beading, or weaving—becomes both a reflection and a mechanism for managing the uncertainties of my body. Each piece I create is a fragile gesture of self-preservation, a method of making sense of what feels uncontrollable and ephemeral.

I taught myself to weave on a children’s loom shortly after the Big Seizure. I learned to focus on the in’s and out’s, the control of tension, while accepting that life Before would be abstract at best, forgotten at worst. In the process of creating, I reclaim fragments of memory and identity, and with one wrong pull, it could all come undone. But in the fragility of this work, I find resilience—the power of creating something new from the rubble of what once was.

In my studio, I utilize play as a process, keeping myself happy and laughing without rules or traditional techniques. Pinks and sparkles are prominent, celebrating and critiquing the girly-girlness I was raised with while finding my place as a femme non-binary lesbian. These moments of joy, of questioning, and of confession are embedded in the overly-long titles I give my pieces, reflecting on misremembered nostalgia, forced necessary rest, and internalized femme hysteria. My work manufactures queer joy, even when I have none myself.