My practice begins with attentive movement—walking, bicycling, lingering in place. I return to sites repeatedly, allowing ideas to evolve in response to their specific environments. This embodied engagement becomes a form of research; the textures, colors, smells, and cultural imprints of a place accumulate within me and inform the work.

While living in Santa Barbara, I created a series shaped by visits to a seaside cemetery during holiday seasons—a time when, after the passing of both my parents, I found solace not in gatherings but in quiet communion with the dead. I traced headstones, forming poems from engraved names, a gesture that felt like collaborative ritual. The act echoed a kind of ouija board—an ephemeral dialogue with the departed, their families, and the stone carvers themselves.

The language in these works draws from the poetry of Nayyirah Waheed, whose self-published texts I recontextualize as visual fragments—delicate, translucent, and breath-like. In doing so, I aim to extend her words into another form of life. The resulting works, rendered on vellum, function as ghost-bodies—fragile, translucent surfaces that hold traces of the unseen and the unheard. They echo the ephemeral nature of unpublished texts, silenced voices, and ancestral memory. In this series, the vellum becomes a medium of invocation, where absence takes form and language hovers between presence and disappearance. The works act as offerings: to the dead, to the overlooked, and to the soft imprints that resist permanence yet endure.

Continuing my site-responsive practice, I created a series of fish prints inspired by gyotaku, the Japanese art of printing directly from fish as a way to honor and record the catch. I used locally caught rockfish from the Channel Islands—sacred waters off the Santa Barbara coast that sustain a third of the world’s whale population. After printing, I cooked and ate the fish, completing a respectful cycle of use. The prints became collages, layered with fragments of poetry, cut-out figures, and flicks of sumi ink—a natural substance made from pine soot—echoing the fluid, living textures of the sea. Rooted in local ecologies and the quiet rituals of daily life, this work reflects my ongoing relationship with place, reciprocity, and the poetics of the more-than-human world.