I was born in Portland, OR but have been living in Worcester, MA for the last three years. The distance felt over 3000 miles can boggle you. The space can seem either truly bizarre, as if you’ve been simply plucked up from a map and placed a few feet over, or as if no time, money, or vessel could ever get you where you wanted to be. The idea of the familiar v. unfamiliar, the normal v. odd, and how these come to be defined can be found in my work. I’m keen on the everyday monster and drawing what you can think up.

When thinking about how I would approach the chaboo, I knew I wanted to play around with it and leave plenty of room for the piece itself to influence the design of what I was drawing and etching. The octopus tentacles worked perfectly for this as they could grow and coil in an organic way, allowing some spontaneity to occur during the process. I wanted the surfaces of the chaboo to act almost as pages of a book, each one developing the narrative my images offer. I wanted these images to provoke thoughts of normalcy and origin.
I used an etching tool used for dry point and acid etchings to carve out the image on the chaboo. I mixed a printing ink to match the purple heart inlay and spread this over the etching, wiping away the ink that was left on the surface of the chaboo, the rest of it remaining in the grooves of the image. My technique is subtle but invites an exploration.