I am fascinated by the state of being in-between; by the mental spaces that are somehow neither here nor there, but also somehow both here and there.
I began experiencing dissociation as a coping mechanism at a young age, going through bouts of depersonalization and derealization where it felt as though my mind was separate from my body and my surroundings, as if I was watching myself go through life in third person, distorting the threshold between reality and nonreality. This disconnection from my surroundings was simultaneously comforting and terrifying. Drifting in and out of this dissociated state created both a fragmented view of reality and a fragmented sense of personal identity.
My work is concerned with the psychological antitheses of dissociation – comfort vs discomfort, safety vs danger, and reality vs non-reality, and the continuum of liminal space between these polarities. Through large-scale installations and the use of materials with physically opposing properties, I have the viewer enter a physical space. These spaces, like that of the mental state of dissociation, have an uncertainty about them and are simultaneously comfortable and uncomfortable, and safe and dangerous.
In a broader sense, these concepts are not limited to pathological dissociation, but also applicable to other experiences and transitions in life where one finds themselves at an uncertain threshold between two points, particularly adolescence.