(self portrait) IDENTITY

I’ve never known what it means to feel at home in myself. If there’s a word I keep returning to, it’s misplaced. That sense of being out of sync has followed me since childhood, as if the world spoke a language where words held alternate meanings, a world where I was expected to perform without ever being given the script. An autism diagnosis late in life provided me with a lot of answers to a lifetime of feeling out of place, but it wasn’t a solution. It was just a new way of naming the fracture I’d always carried. A broken identity of who I truly was, and who the world expected/required me to be.

My identity doesn’t feel like a single story. It feels like pieces scattered on the floor, some sharp, some soft, none of them fitting together the way people expect them to. As a result, my body of work includes a multitude of mediums, topics, concepts, etc, because my identity has long chased after a sense of belonging, a feeling of home, a purpose. My self portrait work was initially born out of the need for a subject, but it was also a visual representative of the performing and masking my everyday life required. For a large portion of my life, I don’t believe I ever knew who I really was, and self portraiture became my first option for self exploration, discovery, and later on, excavation.

Limited edition prints available upon request.