Investigates

Investigates identity through embodied transformation, ritual, and ancestral memory.

Statement

Desert Rose extends the physical investigations that began with Casting Paintings, shifting from the release of emotion toward the formation of identity. Created on unstretched canvas laid directly across the floor, each work became a site of sustained bodily engagement. Folding, compressing, rolling, pressing, imprinting, and repeated movement transformed the surface into a record of lived experience rather than a representation of it.

These works emerged during a period of deep personal inquiry into identity, ancestry, and transformation. Influenced by Eastern philosophy, meditation, Reiki, and the relationship between intention and making, the studio became a place where movement, thought, spoken words, and physical labor existed as one continuous practice. Had the process been filmed, the making itself could be understood as a performance. The finished paintings remain as traces of those embodied acts.

The title Desert Rose is drawn from the mineral formations that emerge under conditions of immense pressure within arid landscapes. Their formation became both metaphor and methodology—a reminder that transformation is often the result of sustained pressure rather than sudden change. References to Mexican folklore, the desert, and ancestral memory weave throughout the series, not as attempts to define identity through heritage alone, but as questions about how identity is continually shaped through inheritance, experience, ritual, and personal transformation.

Research Question

What shapes us more deeply: inheritance, experience, or the choices we make in becoming ourselves?

Finding

Identity is not something we discover once. It is something we continually create through the way we choose to engage with our lives.