Take Me With You is resin-cast willow blossoms
suspended from the ceiling. Embedded in the cast willow blossom is a single fiber
from the original bedsheets where my sexual assault occurred. The work is installed
so that the blossoms are attached from treelike formations that extend from the
ceiling. Viewers at the exhibition will be encouraged to pluck one of the cast willow
blossoms to take with them. I hope to release the burden of my traumatic material
focusing more on the sense of release than burden. I hope viewers will hold on to the
seeds to remind themselves that there can be strength and growth after trauma.

A canopy of shelter,
Freed into the world by the wind
The seeds simply let go.
I have processed,
I have re-sculpted,
Now, I release.
So that you may re-grow.

Comfortability.
Ripped,
Stripped,
And shredded… from me.
To sit in the lowest valley and on the highest peak.
Patient. Waiting. Sitting. Healing. Labor. Self-Love.
The landscape is unknown.

“Post Traumatic Growth” is the most obsessive and process-orientated work within my installations. The work
incorporates soft piles of shredded bedsheets of varying heights. The soft growths
or peaks and valleys, as I refer to them represent the time needed to heal after
trauma. Even the process of creating this work was slow and time-consuming.
The artwork physically references a landscape, alluding to the ebbs and flows (peaks
and valleys) of trauma that many perceive as a weakness. I however, see them as a
strength. At one point, I realized that the path followed when walking hand-in-hand
with one’s trauma is an unknown landscape that requires patience to navigate. Like
my good and bad days, the work crescendos and decrescendos, as if traversing an
unknown terrain. I wanted this work to be the largest of the three so that the viewer
could enter the space and feel the immense possibilities of post-traumatic growth as if
entering a landscape.

Post Traumatic Growth

2022

University of Maryland Art Gallery

20ft x 30ft

Shredded up bed sheets

The guilt to lean.
…Additional support.
Without these people, I would not be standing.
Lean on me,
And I will lean on you.

Cast paper pulp bedsheet lips. One of the artist and one of her supporters. Her supporters help her get through her trauma. She leaned on them to heal, they kept her upright and standing.