My work is grounded in the belief that myth is not static but psychologically alive—capable of holding contradictions that resist resolution. Recently the Apollo and Daphne archetype preoccupies my inquiries. Rather than illustrating the myth, I repeatedly engage and fracture it, focusing on moments of pursuit, refusal, and metamorphosis. Daphne’s transformation becomes a site of tension: an act of agency that is also marked by loss, raising questions about protection, autonomy, and erasure. Engagement with process may speed up or slow down a point of instability, where meaning is not resolved but felt.

My process is deliberately rhizomatic rather than linear. Themes emerge through repetition and variation across mediums, with images, gestures, and texts reappearing in altered forms. I move fluidly between painting, film, performance, drawing, and textile, allowing each medium to inform the others. Ritualized action—embroidery, durational performance, bodily repetition—functions as both method and meaning, embedding time, care, and insistence into the work.

Survivor poetry is inscribed onto falling laurel leaves, fracturing language and dispersing it into space. Bits of 24k gold leaf scatters and is carried by viewers’ movements implicating them in reclaiming Apollo’s emblem of poetic authority, transforming the laurel from a symbol forged through violence into an embodied, communal archive of testimony and endurance.

These commemorate my childhood brush with sexual violence. Fragments of Sappho’s poetry situate hand-embroidered handkerchiefs with a lineage of female expression that persists despite historical silencing. The poet’s voice speaks in a register that mirrors the interior world of survivors processing trauma. Laurel-leaf borders connect these intimate acts of mourning to the myth of Apollo and Daphne. Details of each handkerchief below.

This installation uses a projected 3-D print of Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne to invoke Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where shadows stand in for truth. The work reflects our collective inability to fully see—or to acknowledge—how sexual violence permeates society, revealing how myth, beauty, and projection can obscure lived harm even as it persists all around us.

This laser etched edition responds to Washington State’s clearing of a backlog of over 10,000 rape kits, using three pillars of gold-foil prayer sheets to mark the 21 cases solved to date. By activating only half of the state’s six investigative pillars, the installation exposes how justice remains partial and delayed, revealing systemic neglect that allows violence to persist unseen. Details of some etchings below.

Hands of survivors marking time like a ritual calendar. The series honors survivors whose lives, like Daphne’s, were irrevocably transformed, yet who remain in touch with their histories and truths through acts of witnessing and shared narrative.

Massimiliano Soldini’s Apollo & Daphne in perpetual chase. The figures, caught mid-pursuit, are frozen in an eternal cycle of violence and transformation. Their shifting repetition underscores how little the narrative has changed.

Gesture drawings of Soldini’s Apollo and Daphne arranged in a linear sequence above with their mirrored counterparts below. Fluid connective marks bridge the two fields, suggesting transmission between myth and embodiment, consciousness and instinct—how archetypal narratives move through bodies, memory, and time rather than remaining fixed or distant.