Hang Ups

(2016 - 2018)

This was the threshold from college and schooling into the real world. Before art, my days were spent running up and down a grass field - 100 yards down, 100 yards back, frustration rising with my heart rate. My education took a back seat to lacrosse. But it did more than take precedence over my grades; it fundamentally changed my relationship with my body.

As the demands of Division I sports changed the shape of my figure, my mind couldn't keep up. I didn't look like the other girls on campus, and I definitely didn't look like the women flattened between perfume samples in Vogue. Throughout my college experience as an athlete, my environment was riddled with eating disorders. Being an athlete made this harder as using my body was part of my 'job' - it was my body's capacity to perform that brought me here and kept me here in the first place.

When I fell and hit my head on frozen dirt, everything changed. Following my concussion, I spent months sitting in the dark, feeling like my mind and body were two separate entities. It was in this forced stillness that I began to explore my inner world through creative practice. Finally free from athletic demands, I started to explore what mattered to me, and perhaps the other aspects of my universe that made me feel trapped.

Media became my medium because mass media had been my programming. I worked with materials woven into the fabric of mass culture - film, clothing, commercial items - to explore my experience of being a woman. I compiled and edited Disney films and women depicted in films, creating one piece devoted to abstracting Ingmar Bergman's Persona. During this time, I was especially inspired by "The Theory of The Young Girl" by Tiqqun, which explored how young femininity had been co-opted by consumer culture.