artist statement

The foundations of my practice are rooted in my identity as a tribal member of the San Luis Rey Band of Mission Indians (Luiseño/Payómkawichum), alongside my Chicane, Irish, and Scandinavian lineages. Storytelling moves through these inheritances as something carried, altered, and retold. I approach my work as a contemporary continuation of that exchange, utilizing abstraction and material experimentation to challenge expectations of what Indigenous art is allowed to be. 

Through making, I am exploring the ever-shifting nature of lived experience, identity and relationality. My process unfolds by layering uses of gesture and material, each action marking and unmarking what came before, intent on posing questions rather than simply providing answers. Across mediums, my work returns to abstracted spaces where tension and dissonance are fully present. Rather than resolving these conditions, I allow them to remain active, leaving space for vulnerability and reflection in how each piece is encountered.

I most often work with oil paint on canvas, engaging a visual language that at its core is inspired by the abstract expressionist movement, in direct challenge of its history and its exclusions. Alongside painting, I work with found objects, beadwork, performance, glass, projection, metalwork, and printmaking. Moving between mediums introduces shifts in intent, labor, and touch. Use of personal and cultural pattern-work and materials serve as interruptions, becoming a way of holding space between the colonial and Indigenous, the past and present, the open and the contained.