Artist Statement:
In my work, the shower serves as both a literal and metaphorical refuge...a private site where the emotional and cognitive remnants of daily life are confronted, processed, and symbolically washed away. Yet rather than disappearing entirely, these fragments gather within the drain, a threshold between consciousness and the unseen layers of thought and feeling. This imagined buildup drives my work: what form might these layered, internal experiences take if they were made visible?
Using soap and repurposed pages from self-help literature, I explore the relationship between personal emotional labor and the cultural pressure to appear composed, productive, and “clean.” Soap, meant to cleanse, paradoxically collects and transforms in my work, embodying the traces of thought and feeling. The fragmented language of self-help texts reflects society’s persistent promise that emotional difficulty can be managed, optimized, or washed away, yet it too becomes part of this layering, revealing the gap between the ideal of purification and the reality of experience.
Each piece operates like an excavated cross-section of this threshold space, revealing a psychological landscape where soap and text accrue over time. In exposing what is normally rinsed away or concealed, the work questions the cultural expectation that individuals continuously cleanse, improve, and regulate their emotional lives. Rather than offering resolution, these colorful, stratified surfaces suggest that the remnants of living (our doubts, repetitions, and unresolved thoughts) remain present beneath the surface, quietly generating new forms and shaping our inner worlds.