Artist statement For “Selves”

A child who is “seen but not heard” is still listening, still watching, still constructing. 

Information is restricted in the name of protection, but absence creates its own kind of violence. And still, children do not stop asking. They take fragments and build worlds, and those worlds endure.

Selves was the name my sisters and I gave to a game we played as children, something like dolls, but with our own bodies as both characters and objects. Through it, we constructed narratives to make sense of a world we were not fully allowed to understand. The “dollhouses” in this work emerge from that same impulse, staging the adult themes we sensed but could not grasp, distorting reality into something both innocent and uneasy.

In returning to this process, constructing these environments became its own game of Selves, a way of re-entering partial understandings and reconstructing them with knowledge previously unavailable to me. Working with unfamiliar materials, I built objects and figures from mind alone, allowing forms to remain imprecise, blurred, slightly off. The dolls embody this tension, both playful and grotesque, existing between innocence and misinterpretation. These works are not exact recreations but translations of fragmented understanding, where what is withheld does not disappear but is reshaped into something lasting.