I am an interdisciplinary artist and art therapist based in Chicago. These two practices exist independently, yet intertwine as my professional training informs my artistic inquiry of trauma’s manifestation in the body. My visual arts practice rooted in photography expands through video, performance and installation. As my material practice grows, my origins in photography influence ways I use materials to sensorily embody and frame concepts I grapple with. My art making process engages personal memories, reflections on present circumstances, and stories of participants/members of my community whose experiences intersect with mine. I balance play, art-based research, and knowledge gathered from my career in somatic-centered art therapy and trauma counseling. All of these components serve as a basis for my studio practice’s process.

My artistic goal has consistently been to bring multiple worlds together, capturing portals and spaces between them. Finding subtle affinities between geologic time, somatic movement, gendered trauma, and Arabian Peninsula ceremonial healing rituals. Through relational merging and mapping of human and geological bodies, I vision their liberation. I envision liberation as embodiment of agency, resourcefulness on their own terms, restored and devoid of extraction. By doing so, I examine themes of access, agency, power, the invisibly visible, and potential erosion of socio-cultural conditioning distorting our shared realities. I work with the body as a site of transgenerational experiences, a container of memory, in correspondence to geologic time. Expanding on how land formations shaped by weathering and erosion parallel our human bodies’ vast inner worlds. Bodies and landscapes are constantly in flux, against the backdrop of time, a vital force shaping endurance in the face of change, redefining agency and adaptability.

My current research explores two parallel threads, the renegotiation of trauma within an extracted, trauma-endured body as it moves towards belonging and re-emerges as a liberated body. Liberated from the seizing of autonomic trauma-responses, instead present in its inherent agency. Secondly, I attune to the experience of being desensitized and disembodied from the earth. Reorienting the body towards a reciprocal relationship with the earth. I explore these concepts through my artistic process moderating the somatic and internal tensions of grief and acceptance by tracing and re-embodying migratory ancestral healing practices linking bodies and land. These practices remind us to welcome vulnerability. Be humbled by natural cycles. To live in reciprocity with the land.