I utilize present, personal, ancient, and universal sources while overlapping mediums, borrowing textures, and incorporating found objects. My experiences in beekeeping and background in herbalism and horticultural studies profoundly influence my work. I look for ways to visually communicate the depth and beauty inherent in nature, emphasizing the sacred, historical, and essential relationships shared between human beings and the natural world that have been forgotten or lost in the pursuit of modernity. The hive and the ancient practice of beekeeping serve as ideal symbols, bridging past and present, representing healing, the necessity of relationship, interconnectedness, and transcendence.

When creating my work, I research symbols that represent different ideas. I research diverse cultures, including my own, finding value in symbols such as evil eyes, butterflies, skulls, and tree-like textures. Evil eyes are symbols in the Latino community relating to the protection against negative energy or emotion. Skulls can represent the Day of the Dead, which is the remembrance and celebration of loved ones who have died in the Mexican culture. Butterflies represent the Vietnamese culture. They believe butterflies are the passing and resurrection of loved ones, and trees are used within my work to represent life, which can be imbued with a spirit or force. Within these ideas, I sculpturally constructed unusual relationships where life and death collide and was influenced by Memento Mori, which is Latin for remembering death, a concept that was established to help master one’s fear of death and nurture the soul for the hereafter. By doing so, I use saturated colors to create lively scenes while having desaturated colors represent life before death.

 In this project, I found myself inspired by romantic style paintings and the early-mid 20th-century illustrative works in which I wanted to represent cross-generational struggle. Promiscuous fruit is, in essence, about confronting conceptions about women’s bodies, sexuality, promiscuity, and faith. We tap into that window of time in which a girl becomes “grown” when we get drunk for the first time, or perhaps a forlorn sadness about missing girlhood. In the clouds, a near-constant motif in my work, there is something I can only describe as freedom and acceptance, and in the color red, which corresponds with sensuality. I am particularly drawn to this subject matter because it is an outlet in which I have come to rectify and explore the ideologies and fixations of my youth.

 The physical paintings are all painted directly onto 4×4 and 4×3 wooden panels, which are painted so that the grain of the wood is still visible. My digital pieces have all been done in Procreate and Photoshop.