I am a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily in ceramics. Originally trained as a painter focused on portraiture, I shifted to clay in pursuit of a form that could hold presence differently, moving from image toward object and from depiction toward embodiment. In my paintings, I understood the image as an accumulation of abstract gestures resulting in representation. In ceramics, however, gesture is not descriptive but constitutive. Each mark is recorded by the material, producing forms that function as accumulations of touch, time, and decision-making. Through this process, vessels emerge as objects capable of carrying their own subjectivity.

My vessels are conceived as embodiments of specific individuals or reflections of my own interior states. Increasingly, I have become invested in disrupting the vessel’s role as a passive container. Drawing from Paul S. Briggs’ concept of the “refuted vessel,” my recent forms resist utility; surfaces appear protective or defensive, at times even hostile, insisting that the work be encountered as a presence rather than an object of use.

This shift marks a turning point in my practice. While my paintings paid tribute to others, abstracting the skin of my subjects to reflect the complexities of marginalized identity, my ceramic work turns inward. The vessel becomes a site through which I externalize fear, anxiety, and interior experience, developing a language grounded in communion with clay, confrontation with my emotional landscape, and forms of representation that remain intentionally opaque, resisting extractive ways of viewing and considering the body.