Artist Statement

Clay is a material of memory. It records every squeeze, hesitation, and adjustment. Once fired, those actions are fixed — no longer flexible, only able to endure or fracture. I use figurative, narrative-driven ceramic sculpture to examine how female identity is shaped over time through pressure, expectation, and repetition.

My figures exist in static moments where pressure becomes visible. Sensitivity, often mistaken for empathy, is learned through vigilance and through anticipating the needs and moods of others before they are spoken. The figures inhabit moments where that practiced composure begins to strain. They carry too many roles and too much responsibility, and their bodies reveal the quiet labor of staying steady.

Fragments of personal and collective experience shaped by systems that regulate how bodies should behave, appear, and comply. Childhood appears not as innocence, but as rehearsal. Expectations are introduced early and reinforced — through praise, correction, and models of who girls are told they will become. The work asks where those rehearsals settle in the body.

Anger in this work is not an outburst. It is cumulative. It emerges from repetition — from being asked to hold, perform, and endure without release. Rather than softening that critique, the work allows it to remain unresolved. The figures do not pose. They do not resolve. They remain caught in moments where compliance begins to fail.

Each sculpture marks a threshold — a body that absorbs but does not disappear, a form that resists not through spectacle, but by revealing the cost of constant adjustment.