Time and Being revolves around human existentialism—the understanding that we’re fundamentally unknowable amidst a terrifying and senseless world.

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Strange animals, warped bodies, and strings of disjointed, contrasting human thoughts occupy each surface. I work on domestic, household items like napkins, handkerchiefs, scraps of fabric, and clothing—things that, to me, make up a contemporary genre scene, or artifacts that embody our everyday life—and decorate them with creatures inspired by the flat, pictorial nature of Medieval art and the cruelty that characterized their era. In the Medieval landscape, there are no facades: their aesthetic doesn’t try to idealize our bodies or make them more brave or heroic than they really are. They show us figures that are easily starved, crushed, and burdened, while our minds are preoccupied with tales of great mythological beasts and personal anxieties. Surrounded by sickness, death, war, and poverty, their creative work reflects an experience colored by a lifetime of fear and loss. The writings I include in my pieces are collected poems, phrases, and personal writings that further reflect the disorienting reality of being human.

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I painstakingly embroider into my fabric, alternating between the front and the back, and in the process obscure a portion of that carefully stitched line. Both the text and imagery float in a vacant, empty void of pale fabric, visualizing that isolation that comes with self-awareness. The guts of the embroidery hang out the front, knotted, with the clean face turned inward. At some points, a clean stem-stitch peeks out—little moments of glimmering order and sobriety sprinkled throughout human experience. The finished works can never be seen in their entirety at once; some are locked into frames, their backs facing outward, and others are touchable, but only viewed through the violence of peeling it back from the wall.

 

We can never truly know each other. We all bear the cross of personhood, but the languages we share are fundamentally flawed—in the rare moments we share with one another, we can only describe approximations of our inner feelings and thoughts.