My work is generated from the confluence of intense subjective experience and academic research; thus, accessing this work requires understanding some things about me. First, I am trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, generally queer, and neurodivergent, among other things. Second, I grew up in an interstitial period for these groups, where urban queer centers were gentrifying away, and nascent queer online communities were just starting to form. This was a period characterized by intense silence: there was no representation, no way to see or understand myself in wider culture. I turned to online participatory culture nodes, joining what were functionally digital roving bands of queer youth, and began to intuitively construct an iconography with which to describe myself. Third, I became an adult as these words simultaneously gained greater reach. I keenly remember the time before and after there came to be labels with which to describe these experiences, useful to make ourselves visible to cishetero audiences and (more importantly) to each other. My work has two goals-to form a mythology with which to render myself legible, and to promote and honor the strategies of queer participatory culture that helped me survive.

For the first: I still use my iconographical codex, further developed by academic research into studio art, theory, art history, and gender studies. With this codex, I construct allegorical narratives about my individual subjective experiences, peopled with garish animal-human hybrids, thus forming the mythology with which I understand and explain both the world and my experiences. I deliberately refuse external access to this codex, which— emerging from decades of idiosyncratic translations of cultural exposure— is likely incomprehensible to external viewers. I thus offer the audience access to my experience of culture: not meant for them, not designed to center their experiences, but nonetheless available for enthusiastic adaptation.

That said, those viewers willing to decenter themselves and look to my work’s margins will find a different kind of codex, more conventionally legible: in process, material, and formal design, I echo the allegorical gestures of my imagery. There, one can also find gestures to the second goal: I offer this work not to speak for anyone but myself, but rather as one example of how to so speak, to make idiosyncratic experiences visible in a world that reflexively devalues difference; and as a reminder that one does not need perfectly proprietary vivisected understanding of another person’s lifeworld upon which to found intimacy and shared culture. I invite viewers to mine my work for processes and methodologies they might employ themselves, in the vein of participatory cultures. Accordingly, I leave visible traces of my work’s creation, including skeletal scaffolding, the aggregation of frenetically layered armatures for figures in my drawings, and through disclosures in statements like this. I also participate in projects designed to tell communal stories— both my own and from others within my communities— and in projects that seek to make the means and methods of visual expression more widely available to broad audiences.