Blooming Illusions: Exploring the Intersection of Nature and Artifice Through Mixed Media

I have recently been fascinated by the delineation of what we deem real versus unreal. What interests me most is how we determine what can exist, and is a facade in our lived environment. As such, I experimented with combining various media such as knitwear, photography, painting, and embroidery in each piece to emphasize this idea. With the natural world in mind, I created pieces with biomorphic elements that creates confusion in the viewer. As an example, the knitted dress was inspired by a beautiful hibiscus flower that I came across. I utilized color, texture, and the cascading form of the flora as inspiration for the dress. It presents itself in many different contexts throughout my body of work, whether it be on a manikin or in the corner of a frame. This phenomena in and of itself speaks to the duality, the inquiry of what makes something manmade or naturally occuring, what is possible and impossible in this world. My goal for this body of work was to expand our conventional ideas about normal and abnormal, the real versus imagined. 

I use organic forms – mostly flowers and biomorphic images – as a means to examine the relationship between reality and fabrication, the natural and the constructed. I seek to understand how we perceive these differences by translating flowers and other flora into photos, textiles, paintings, drawings, and even murals in various ways. As a result, I am also creating a dialogue between the nuance of an image, symbol, and what it means for something to be so innately artificial, yet intrinsically characteristic of the natural world.