My painting practice is rooted in lived experience—grief, healing, and the quiet symbols encountered along the way. Each canvas becomes a somatic site of transformation, combining local materials, intuitive gestures, and layered mark-making to metabolize emotion. Painting, for me, is a durational process in which the slowness of sorrow finds form.

Attuned to the overlooked, I draw symbolic richness from natural encounters: a fallen flower, a snake crossing my path, the quiet presence of feathers. A pivotal moment with a rattlesnake catalyzed a series exploring the serpent as mythic archetype—death, rebirth, the ouroboros. Similarly, a body of work using eagle feathers evolved into a visual language that honors ancestral and spiritual lineages, culminating in a community ceremony that integrated breath, rhythm, and image.

Following my father’s passing, I began collecting fallen flora on daily walks. These ephemeral forms became devotional materials—embedded into mixed-media paintings as acts of remembrance. Through this practice, I explore how memory might be composted into color, and how grief, shaped through touch, might touch others in return.

In a recent series on paper, I used natural inks made from flowers, plants, rust, and other earth-based materials. The tension between the fragility of the medium and the immediacy of gesture became central, transforming the act of drawing into a kind of channeling, where material and spirit converged.