My artistic practice explores world-building, trauma, memory, and horror through 2D mixed media and photographic ephemera. Growing up, I was a monster: a trans queer man, othered in rural Evangelical spaces. I found refuge in the grotesque imagery of cinema’s horror classic creature features. My work constructs worlds where identity is fluid, untamed, and breaking free from religious and societal bondage. In these spaces, I summon abject monsters, figures of defiance and hypervisibility. They are unwanted, intrusive, and alien, drawing on our fears of the unknown. These creations reclaim the monstrous Queer’s right to be seen. 

Scavenging for materials mirrors my own reconstruction, piecing together a self beyond the limits of the church and the binary. Each work is stitched, altered, and reimagined, much like I’ve been both estranged from and tethered to community. Projecting fantasy onto documented spaces invokes the experience of escapism and the distortion of memory resulting from traumatic events. Working with found images is an exploration into time, memory, and space, butchering and intervening within a predetermined frame. My process involves distorting these images and intuitively responding to their content and composition. In doing so, I create narratives that can provide comfort or unsettle my audience, drawing parallels to the experience of Queer trauma and uncomfortability. Through my experimentation with photography, painting, and drawing, I craft vibrant, unapologetic worlds for the monstrous.