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It was the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college and I found myself on a date with a coworker at a pizza restaurant around the corner from where we worked.

When we sat down, there was a young girl sitting with her family a few tables over staring at me.

I started staring back.

This went on for quite some time, each of us examining and pondering about the other.

We were frozen there, together, just staring.

She was holding awe and excitement, hoping one day, she too could be like me.

This was a familiar stare, one i did many times as a child, I recognized it immediately. She thought I was cool.

And as I sat there, for the first time ever on the other side of this stare I knew all too well, I felt immense sadness.

I was holding the pain of womanhood, wishing to spare her from its fate. I couldn’t help but think of all the cruel things I had endured, and all the terribly cruel things that awaited her in life. How we are helpless in changing this fate.

I have referred to this moment ever since as a mirror tunnel.

I’ve spent years pondering on this moment. For a long time I wanted to make a piece on it. I spent countless hours sketching around it and I always seemed to come up short. No matter what I tried, nothing ever felt like it captured the profoundness I was seeking in portraying a mirror tunnel.

I finally called it quits on trying to force a project and decided the piece would find me when it was ready to become, even if it took decades.

This is a conversation held over and over amongst women and girls. Its a mirror tunnel between generations. Decades of grief and joy bottled up in one split second, shared in a glance on a random Tuesday night while eating pizza.

girl again

What I didn’t notice for a long time, is that all my incomplete mirror tunnel sketches, became other pieces. They lended themselves to new concepts and inspired new experiments.

Around this time, is when I started to feel like maybe I had finally found a style for my work. I kept leaning in and exploring it, and we have stumbled our way through this rabbit hole all the way to present day girl again.

I still hold out hope that Mirror Tunnels of Woman and Girl will one day see itself into actuality, when it’s ready to enter the world. Until that moment, I honor its presence and influence in my work and acknowledge its impact on all my pieces made over the last 3 years.

Its grandness is undeniable, palpable.

I do not remember anything from that date except the girl at the table on the other side of the room. We are immortalized in that split second forever. On hot summer days, I am reminded that we still remain there 3 years later, sparing each other from the world’s depravity, protected and held softly in our longing.

and what if this pain never stops moving through me

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In My Solitude is a piece on isolation and otherness.

When designing this piece, I was thinking about my experiences surrounding lunch as a child.

I ate lunch with the same group of people everyday through middle and high school. I ate lunch with this group of people not because they were friends, but because my alternative usually meant sitting alone.

Now this is not a story to say I had no friends, because I did. I just didn’t have many, and in our school lunch was split into two groups.

This story is actually about how I was horribly unlucky and never got the same lunch with the few friends I did have.

So I sat with this same group of people for years where only one of them would ever bother talking with me. It was incredibly lonely. I often wondered why I couldn’t become closer to these girls and why I always felt so isolated from them.

I often felt ‘othered’ as a child. No place seemed to fit except the place I had in my head. I spent most of my time there daydreaming and longing for more.

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Was it lonelier to sit alone, or to be alone with a table full of people?

im doing my best to lay the child down tenderly and not walk away with bitterness on my arms

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This piece is from my BFA show in 2025. It is what I consider the culmination of all my work I was doing in undergrad. The grand finale if you will.

When I started college, I went through a long, painful, and messy falling out with my childhood best friend that clouded most of those years with grief.

The fall of my junior year I started messing with making ceramic objects move and created a piece called we were girls once. While making the piece, the surface decoration reminded me of the sprinkles on cosmic brownies.

I was flooded with memories of my old friend and I coming home from school, grabbing two cosmic brownies out of the pantry, and then launching into a sprinkle trade where we debated who got what color sprinkle.

Posting that piece on social media was really difficult since I knew she would see it. There was also a part of me that hoped she would reach out after seeing it, but she didnt.

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I spent a lot of years in denial that our friendship was over, and that she had become really awful towards me. I never thought I would have to picture life without her in it, I didn’t even know how.

I knew that leaving undergrad would mean the end of us circulating each others lives, the end of our mutal connections, and I wanted to symbolize moving on within a piece for my senior show. She was the first piece I made in that body of work, and she would also be the last.

I finished this piece the night before install, and barely got it done in time for the show. It was also my most complex neon/ ceramic work up to that point.

I programmed a controller to fade the red neon in and out to the speed of slowing breaths. I like to relate the two forms to the two of us, the fading neon symbolizing the ending of our friendshipship. The light never fully turns off because in many ways we will always be connected.

I feel a lot of peace when I look at this work. I was finally ready to accept and let go, life did not end without her. I found along the way in my grief people who were able to see and connect with my life in ways I never thought possible.

I got to begin again.