2026 collection
A BODY IS NOT SEPERATE FROM THE ENVIRONMENTS THAT SHAPE IT.
IT ABSORBS THEM, REMEMBERES THEM, BECOMES THEM.
Body:Habitat marks a monent of internal shift.
Where landscape and identity collapse into one another, and the self begins to take on the textures of the places that changed it.
Body:Habitat is a collection born from a period of transformation. An experience of movement, exposure, and emotional reorientation that began during time spent in Costa Rica (January 2026). What initially presented itself as a physical journey gradually revealed itself as something more internal: a subtle but undeniable shift in the relationship between the body and its surroundings.
In this work, the body is no longer treated as a fixed or isolated form. Instead, it becomes permeable; capable of absorbing, reflecting, and ultimately becoming the environments it inhabits. Ocean, shell, flora, heat, and atmosphere begin to imprint themselves onto the figure, dissolving the boundary between external landscape and internal identity.
The paintings within Body Habitat explore this moment of transition. Figures appear in states of surrender, fragmentation, or quiet transformation, as if caught in the act of becoming something else. Organic materials: shells, botanical forms, and oceanic textures - do not simply surround the body, but integrate with it, suggesting a merging rather than a separation.
There is a tension throughout the work between control and release. The compositions often reference traditional portraiture and devotional imagery, grounding the viewer in familiarity, while simultaneously introducing elements that disrupt the expected structure of the human form. This juxtaposition reflects the experience of change itself: both intimate and disorienting, both grounding and destabilizing.
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At its core, Body Habitat is not about place, but about what place does to a person. It considers how environments linger within us, how they alter perception, memory, and self-concept long after we have physically left them.
This collection marks the beginning of that transformation. Not a conclusion, but an entry point into a body that is still in the process of becoming.
Chapter I: COMING SOON
May 15, 2026
Special Mini Series:
ch. I
MOUTHS IN BLOOM
There is a story told about three openings.
They did not begin as mouths, but as quiet thresholds within the body; places where the outside could enter and the inside could be altered.
No one remembers who made them. Only that they appeared when the body was ready to change.
The first opened too soon.
It split without warning, as if something beneath the surface had grown too large to contain.
What began as a fracture became a hunger.
It could not close again.
It did not learn how.
And so it remained open - taking in everything, unable to choose, unable to stop.
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The second learned differently.
It felt the same pressure, the same swelling beneath the surface, but it resisted.
It held itself still at the edge of becoming.
It believed that if it waited long enough, the need to open would pass.
So it studied restraint. It practiced silence. It became disciplined in its stillness.
But in holding itself closed, it began to forget what it was meant to receive.
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The third did not hesitate.
When the moment came, it opened fully.
Not out of urgency,
and not out of fear..
but with a kind of knowing.
It took in what was offered without questioning its nature.
It did not measure.
It did not filter.
It did not ask what would remain after.
And because of this, it changed the fastest.
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It is said that each of them believed they were in control.
That they could decide what entered and what did not.
That the boundary belonged to them.
But the body knows otherwise.
The body does not wait for permission to become something new.
It responds.
It adapts.
It reshapes itself around what it has been given.
And over time, the difference between them disappeared.
The one that opened too soon,
the one that refused to open,
and the one that devoured everything -
all were changed
by what passed through them.
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And this is the lesson that remains:
you do not become
only by what you choose..
you become
by what you let in,
by what you resist,
and by what overtakes you anyway.
The body keeps all of it.
And eventually, it blooms from it.
“You become by what you let in, by what you resist, and by what overtakes you anyway.”
