My creative practice uses ceramic sculpture and printmaking as a means to narrate my personal life events and the struggle I experience remembering those events. These themes are fueled by my research of memory loss and distortion through the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD.) In many ways, I use form, line, and color to portray confusion. I explore the questions “What would it be like to see my memories as tangible objects?” and “How would those objects interact with one another?”

 

The ceramic process is saturated with modification, experimentation, and adaptation. I tend to begin with an idea that morphs and evolves the longer I try to communicate that idea. In many ways this process mirrors what it is like to remember a traumatic event. In my personal experience, it can be a matter of minutes between having a crisp memory and having a blurry, amorphic perception of that memory. Instead of suppressing these delusions I process them visually as tangible objects interacting with space and one another. Much like ceramics, printmaking has many opportunities for evolving ideas. Printmaking allows for spontaneous mark-making and endless experimentation. Unlike a drawing that exists one time, printmaking allows for multiple prints of the same image therefore creating an environment to experiment freely without the fear of messing up.

 

My art is a combination of expressing my personal struggle and discovering processes that evolve proportional to the ideas I’m presenting. In many ways this process is therapeutic in helping me discover lost pieces of my memory and mapping out the patterns and layers they create. Further helping me to process memory effectively, and confidently. My art highlights the research I have done on the subject of memory and PTSD.