​​Make-believe Forest (2018-current)​​​​​​​​

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I was recently told I should feel grown up by now. ​

 

Since hearing this declaration about my age, I’ve become curious about how distance is fabricated between child and adult in the United States. The process of “coming-of-age” is not a neutral passage, but a socially enforced upward progression—marked by seemingly innocuous events such as prom, milestones like graduation, and solidified by heteronormative capitalism. Forgetting childhood is not incidental; it is taught, normalized, and expected. ​

 

With this emphasis on moving up and up and up, I have become preoccupied with those childhood selves that came before. Where did they go? How do we mourn them? And now as an adult—a role I never auditioned for—why do we speak about my inner child as if she is sometimes there? Can I keep her?

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Make-believe Forest is an ongoing body of work to find where childhood selves retreat during adulthood and if it is possible to bring them back. The forest—often a transformational space in children's stories—is an invented landscape built of many parts that assemble into sculptural installations. The objects within appear mutable, as if they are staged for performance, play, or ritual. Moving through the forest asks viewers to decide how it grows, functions, and decays—mirroring the ways children and adolescents question how the world works around them, where they belong, and why.

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I work with materials associated with childhood—playground sand, children's construction paper, secondhand toys—and take them through processes of transformation and preservation. The labor involved is often slow, repetitive, and demanding. I make paper pulp from kids' construction paper and gravestone dust that I collected from a headstone carver. I mix playground sand into a secret mixture and apply it by hand, tediously and intimately, until it dries into permanent sandcastles. I preserve teddy bears—the first object I knew I loved as a child—upside down on their heads using layers of candle wax. Candle wicks sprout from their hands and feet. Remaining unlit, the bears—and the childhoods they symbolize—are rendered static and enduring. 

 

Each solo exhibition I build is a chance to go back to the forest and uncover a new, unexplored patch. Each slice is a psychological space to acknowledge the loss of childhood, as well act as a site for its possible regeneration. To feel even more part of the forest, I put food that has been in my mouth into the work. Olive pits saved from eating black olives dangle from black pleather trees and punctuate sand surfaces. These inert pits, frequently misidentified as seeds, blur a central question that runs through the work: What does it take to grow? What can be a germinating force?

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This page serves as a catalog of the objects that have appeared within the forest. To date, four slices of the landscape have been uncovered: Black Forest, Purple Forest, Sand Murmurs/Tongue Pockets/Thumb Secrets (Yellow Forest), and Of Ash & Ice (White Forest).