Everything I make with clay is a self-portrait. Prior to medically transitioning, I lived in pain and discomfort, regarding myself as something abhorrent and undeserving. This self-image led me to create a broken, tortured body of work. Since medically transitioning, I’ve become kinder to myself, both past and present. ‘It’ll be okay, I promise’ is something I said to one of my old sculptures once, post top-surgery. I realized that this phrase is an embodiment of the shift in my self-perception and, by extension, in my artwork.
“It’ll be okay, I promise” attempts to physicalize my emotional transition from discomfort to warmth. Instead of broken abstract sculptures, I have whole bodies, built slowly, inch by inch. They don’t exist in isolation or in a vacuum; they’ve been given a warm, soft place to inhabit, and one of them comforts another. They are surrounded by memories, photos from my past that were initially uncomfortable for me to share. But I gain power by moving through this discomfort, just as I move through my (and others’) discomfort with my body by painstakingly reconstructing it, in clay and in flesh.
