I am a Performance Artist and Sculptor focusing on religion, identity, and gender. Until recently, Humor has been quietly present in my body of work. This is evident in my works like, “Lady Parts 1,” where I poke my finger through a hole in the wall, and in “Pony,” where I create an amalgamation of objects that result in me looking like a horse. I explore this further in my current work where I employ cheating to obtain athletic dance positions I can’t otherwise achieve. Now the humor in my work is more pronounced as I explore breaking down videos from social media and recreating the ideas from these videos in a way that is almost absurd.
I have a background in dance and currently I am researching modern and contemporary dance. As a performance artist who identifies as fat, I am interested in the way the female body has been depicted in the history of performance art as predominately thin. Even in a field that has been labeled as feminist, I argue there is still room for inclusion. For this reason, my work often suggests ideas about body image, body politics, and feminism.
I am influenced by contemporary performance artists and sculptors including Janine Antoni, Lauren Kalman, and Rebecca Horn. I discovered my current practice by way of sculpture training and for that reason, my performance work emphasizes sculptural objects as pieces I interact with in my videos or as pieces I display as ephemera of a performance. By utilizing techniques such as stillness, mimicry, and repetition, I become the object in my piece I am working on or performing by placing emphasis on the fat body as an identity.
