I want to address what it means to survive in this world in a female body because historically and contemporarily, suffering has been a gendered experience. Women are expected to suffer separately from men-- and in silence. From Puccini’s doomed Mimi to Fragonard’s portraits, phthisical women, women with the appearance of having consumption, have always been admired under the male gaze. I use painting and drawing to explore these historical contexts of beauty and womanhood, while also incorporating an awareness of the paranoia of living in the digital age where we are constantly stimulated by commercial broadcasting.

I reference histological slides, bacterial growth, and medical stock photos to find beauty in what might initially be grotesque or horrifying. I use bright, caustic colors because I see a strange mirroring between (often ostentatious) commercial imagery, depictions of bacteria in medical textbooks, and stained histology slides. None of these depictions are authentically natural-- they’ve been manipulated, painted, distorted-- but all of them are connected to nature and biology in varying ways.

I find myself attracted to medical imagery because it has been a persistent presence in my life. Both of my parents are physicians and as a child I often overheard them discussing medical topics, and I frequently flipped through their textbooks, observing the medical photographs printed inside. Confronting real depictions of the body, in both a healthy state and a sickly one, at a young age, desensitized me to my initial disgust and allowed me to appreciate the power and beauty in medical photography.

In the process of making and presenting my paintings, I think it’s important for me, as an artist, and for viewers of my work to acknowledge that the subjects in my paintings are real women or, in the case of the paintings of cell slides, artifacts of real women. I realize that calling disease and clinical photography beautiful could be controversial. I don’t want to belittle suffering by calling it ‘beautiful,’ rather I want to challenge myself and my audience to explore nuances of the word. Beauty is more complex than visual aesthetics or ‘prettiness.’ Beauty can often be aesthetic but it permeates deeply through the surface of its subject eliciting a feeling of both awe and fear. To me, beauty is terrifying, powerful, and far beyond our control.