Working within the context of disability art, my art addresses the social stigmas surrounding people who live in chronically ill bodies and serves as a conduit between differently abled people and those around them. Interdisciplinary sculptures using abstracted anatomy and disability aesthetics visually communicate the pain and constraints that I live with daily from fibromyalgia. The strength, beauty, and fragility of glass mirror that of the human body. Glass is mesmerizing and magical, an amorphous material that I manipulate with heat, gravity, and breath. Dancing between liquid and solid, it has an ethereal quality unmatched by any other material.

When glass alone cannot tell the story, I include clay, metal, and wood. Clay is meditative, malleable, and forgiving, teaching patience in the process. Wood embodies a once-living being, symbolizing life, growth, and stability. Metal is elemental, strong, and conductive. Heat and force, patience and manual manipulation: the forces used to forge structures are often the same to treat those who live in pain.

Shifting between techniques, glass grants me flexibility when my symptoms become an obstacle. By using my physical body to shape concepts, I reject the notion that my diagnosis rules my life. Weaving threads of existential interconnectivity between humans and the natural world, my work validates the emotions brought forth by chronic illness and invites conversations that explore the body as a vessel for the human experience.