Prescription medication helps me return to everyday life. Yet it cannot tell me how to move forward or who I am beyond being a patient or a victim. Violence and fear do not simply recede into the past. Their effects continue to shape our bodies, thoughts, and actions, often reinforced by social prejudice, the perceptions of others, and the judgments we internalize. My practice begins with a question: Are we defined by memory, or can we reshape our sense of self by changing our relationship to it? 

Through observation and documentation, I examine how past experiences surface in bodily sensations, habits, and everyday actions. Making allows me to trace these experiences, understand myself from different perspectives, and begin to rework my relationship with memory. 

My practice is grounded in metalsmithing and 3D printing. I combine metal, silicone, and fiber through a range of fabrication processes. Their contrasting physical properties allow protection and confinement, control and flexibility, to coexist within a single work. These material relationships also bring past experiences into the present, giving form to questions of memory, relationships, and identity. Working across materials and processes leaves the work open to multiple interpretations and sensory encounters. 

Throughout this process, I ask how much agency I have in my relationship with memory and the perceptions of others. Social stigma surrounding past experiences can become part of how we see ourselves, narrowing our sense of who we are and who we might become. Labels such as “patient” or “victim” may make a complex person easier to understand, but they also risk reducing that person’s identity to a wound. By making and sharing my work, I confront the fear of being defined by these labels and bring personal experience into a shared space. I understand recovery as a process shaped by relationships, empathy, and new ways of seeing, as well as individual effort. I hope my work invites viewers to reflect on how memory and social judgment have shaped their sense of self and to imagine a different future.