Senior Thesis (2021-2022)

 I have always been fascinated by how the human body functions. However, what has impacted my life the most are the moments when my body has malfunctioned. Since an early age, I have constantly felt that my body has been damaged and substandard. As a dancer, it was frustrating to have to deal with recurring injuries and disorders that prevented me from doing what I loved most. Having surgeries to correct these injuries and genetic issues became a routine for which I constantly seemed to be preparing. Even the most experienced doctors and surgeons failed to correct these malformations, which ultimately led to the loss of dance, subsequent disorders, severe trauma, and an unfortunate lack of trust in both healthcare professionals and my own body. However, after the loss of dance from my life, I shifted my creativity from a physical expression to a visual one through painting and drawing.  I found that I was not only able to replace dance with art as a creative outlet, but that I could create imagery that was able to visually represent those experiences in order to help myself address my trauma as well as connect with others.   In my Senior Art Thesis work and likely in my future work, I explored and portrayed the effect that these circumstances have had on me physically, psychologically, and emotionally by creating dream-like environments, scenarios, and abstractions to parallel and therapeutically confront my experience with trauma and PTSD through realistic and surrealistic paintings.