Artist Statement

On average, people have about 60,000 thoughts per day, many being negative and repetitive. The emotional tensions that exist in a human being at any given moment are indescribably immense and speak to the anxiety and depression that a person may experience. For me, the shower is a place of spiritual solace, where the day’s thoughts are washed away from my mind and body, collecting in my shower drain pipes. I wonder, “What do these numerous layers of thoughts and emotions look like in this place? And what form do they take?” 

I have always been fascinated by an individual’s dual ability of expressing and withholding emotion. Oftentimes, a person has a difficult time showing how they feel and instead contain those feelings inside of their minds and bodies, selectively revealing them in safe, private spaces. 

By using the metaphorical materials of soap and self-help book paper, my work delves into this tense relationship between self and place, specifically exploring the emotional connection between an individual’s inner life and the shower, all while functioning at a crossroad between abstract-expressionist painting, minimalism and sensory experience. Rather than soap being used as a tool to clean oneself, I see the soap I work with as relics that contain amalgams of past thoughts, feelings and emotions. 

Each work functions as an excavated cross-section of this subterranean and psychological landscape of residual soap and self-help book paper. These works represent the profound internal weight of an individual's emotional life over psychological time.