WINTER 2025 – PRESENT
Transitions, Thresholds, and the Cost of Growth
This body of work explores the tension between preserving the self we have known and evolving beyond it. Each piece considers the thresholds where growth requires something to be left behind. When belonging to something larger risks diminishing the individual, when honoring our origins conflicts with who we are becoming, and when the bonds that sustain us must also be held more loosely.
Working on paper with mixed media, I create images that function as symbols and maps of transition. Thread in varied colors pierces each surface, forming connections and separations at once: it wounds the paper while suturing it closed. Mounted to canvas board and preserved beneath encaustic wax, the drawings exist in multiple states simultaneously; neither fully formed nor completely undone, but suspended in the space between what was and what is becoming.
The materials embody the questions at the heart of the work. Paper becomes vulnerable skin; thread represents the instinct to connect, even when connection creates the punctures necessary for transformation; and wax becomes a membrane between preservation and change. The thread’s changing colors do not alter its symbolism: each piece asks what we inherit, what we must transcend, what we must unlearn, and what we must disconnect from. Every arrival requires a leaving behind, yet the invisible bonds between our former and emerging selves continue to sustain us. Growth always costs something and is worth documenting.
