Letter From the Artist | The Creative Process

On January 30, 206, cancer entered my life and began dismantling the woman I thought I knew. My breasts, my hair, my skin. All once familiar markers of femininity became landscapes of loss. In the mirror, I didn’t recognize myself. 

But beneath this changed body, another one began to speak: the body of my childhood. Cancer reopened memories of sexual abuse I buried for years. 

During six cycles of chemotherapy, I turned to art to enter those memories, grieve what was lost, and reconstruct what remained. The Anatomy of the Present is a body of artwork that exists between wound and beauty, mourning and resilience. Each one of them are acts of reclamation: a way to reclaim my body, femininity, childhood, and voice. 

My process usually begins with an idea, a memory, or an emotion. I gather and create imagery from different sources: old family photographs, images I photograph myself, found and stock photography, digitally reconstructed images, and sometimes AI-generated elements when I’m looking for something surreal or specific.

These images become my raw materials. From there, I work through collage, selecting, cutting, manipulating, layering, and bringing different fragments together to build the final composition.