I make art as a method of documenting the reality of the world around me, and the work I produce is an aestheticized, heightened, and self-contained version of that reality. In everything is exactly the same, I have created an edited, utopian version of nature that interacts with and responds to movement in the space. The conceptual background for this piece can be found in my past work. Because of my strong foundation in photography, I naturally view my art, no matter the medium, through a photographic lens. John Szarkowski’s The Photographer’s Eye (1966), suggests that the photographer’s job is to recognize, anticipate, and clarify the beauty of the world through photography. This statement resonates strongly with me as someone whose first foray into art was through photography.

My urge to aestheticize every aspect of a work heavily influences the type of work I produce and the materials I use.  The choices I make when creating art, be it embroidery, photography, or installation, are not meant to ignore reality or change it, but instead to amplify the beauty of what I’m capturing or representing. In my work, I am taking the hard-to-identify idea of beauty and reworking existing elements in order to fit that definition. This process is as much about understanding my own definition of beauty as it is shaping things to suit that definition. To that end, I isolate specific details of my physical environment and intensify them, in order to isolate the truths of the beauty I see. My past work has been have been informed by the same aesthetics and intentions that inform my photographic work. I am intent upon aestheticizing everything within reach by way of reconfiguring, however possible, the available visual information in order to represent the broader reality of a situation. Over the course of the academic year, I have continued to explore and push the limits of my ability to reproduce and augment nature, and I have found myself constantly returning to these themes.