I have been reflecting on my past decade-long struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Reinterpreting this experience through the lenses of mythology and magic, I have constructed these Stygian carcasses (from the river Styx, which serves to separate the living and the dead) using my own bodily proportions in muslin, an intermediary material which requires transformation. In this work, I utilize these forms to symbolically rot for me as my body did, performing a type of sympathetic magic (magic worked from afar on another person) on myself, extending my life and allowing all which occurs between birth and death to affect these forms and not myself.
Self Portrait (in Abjection) and Self Portrait (Fragments, Attempts)
Installed as a part of the 2025 VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition exhibited in The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU. Curated by Misa Jeffereis (Associate Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis), Egbert Vongmalaithong (Assistant Curator, ICA at VCU), and Chase Westfall (Head of Gallery and Exhibitions, VCUarts Qatar), the 2025 exhibition reveals a cross-section of emergent practices that are rooted in collaboration, experimentation, and the urgency to make meaning in an ever-changing world.
