For the past several years I have used the politically charged topic of war memorials as an entry point into deeper conversations about power, gender, and memory. My studio practice is process and material driven. I gravitate towards materials that are common in everyday domestic life: matches, soap, bed sheets, needles and thread; and through a simple repetitive process of counting, transform the mundane objects into memorials for the dead. The ephemeral and delicate nature of the work stands in contrast to the hyper-masculine monolithic forms of marble and stone often associated with memorials. The processes employed speak to labor, struggle, endurance, ritual, and meditation; while the materials serve to reframe our collective understanding of power in ways that give strength to culturally feminized notions like empathy, compassion, and mindfulness. 


With this ongoing series of memorials, I invite the viewer to viscerally experience the obscene human cost of war while attempting to behold and digest the staggering scale of innocent lives lost. While not often framed as such, this is a feminist issue, which I address on two fronts; first, by subverting the traditionally masculine gendered aesthetics of war memorials in both my materiality and process; second, by highlighting and humanizing the innocent civilian casualties of war, a sweeping percentage of which includes women, children, minorities, the poor, and other marginalized groups. My work aims to challenge the patriarchal perception of war as valorous with the feminist notion that war (like most social ills) is disproportionately experienced by the most vulnerable members of society. Recently, after having lost my neighbor to domestic violence, I extended this project to investigate violence against women in the United States—itself a kind of war being waged in the intimate domestic spaces near to me.