Mental Configurations

This body of work explores identity and the struggle I’ve faced during semester one 2025. The linen I painted on was the same piece I once projected my raw, trauma-informed work onto in 2024 – it felt fitting to begin this new chapter on that surface. Cutting into it, breaking it apart to form something new, felt deeply uneasy. Especially because the original painting had flowed so naturally from me into the fabric. To abstract what was once a form became an act of risk-taking.

As I tidied my studio space, I began to play with and include objects that had made their way into it: the orange bedroom tape, scrunched soft paper, a supermarket bag I had spilled paint on during a slightly angry art rage. The wool gestures toward my new interest in embroidery and sewing — often dismissed as “women’s work” or “not real art” — but for me, it felt right to embrace it and pull it into my practice.

This work has come together as a way to seal and finish what has felt like an artist identity crisis. Is this what being an artist always feels like? An identity crisis?