Artist Statement and Creative Activity

My recent work focuses on the story I needed to tell about my struggle in accepting visual impairment.  Through the journey of accepting loss, I began to make art again after a long hiatus.  As always, I make art to process.  That has been the role of making for me since childhood.  Because detail in physical making was frustrating, I began to take and alter images with colors and in styles my eyes enjoyed, with a rogue use of applications.  This body of work emerged as I first met the world of digital art in a new way.  Through use of procreate, I journaled the stories of suffering behind the images that had served as my souvenir for each visit with an eye specialist.  I held the suffering of what these images represented--a loss that took four years to accept--and began to wonder if they could be the beginning of something new.  They represent the start of my healing story.  They've been made in recent months as I focus my research on art, healing and the aesthetic experience, and come to own my story.  I see differently now, and that is what the art depicts.  I also see myself differently now--as someone who can be brave and do hard things for myself and others.