Selected Explorations
Some things I’ve made while trying to understand other things. These are personal explorations in design, memory, sense of place, and the question that keeps following me around: Why am I here?
Research
Writing
Mapping
Illustration
Film
Patterns
I know this road. I grew up here.
Returning to it through Cultivator and Creator meant looking again at familiar places, family records, and the things we kept. Handwritten maps to new farms on old ground. Farm ledger gospels. The phrase everyone said for both good and bad days. Things I once took for granted became material for asking better questions about where I came from and how I learned to work.
Drawing, writing, mapping, and making patterns give me different ways into those questions. Sometimes the result is a finished piece. Sometimes it’s another question, which is less convenient but usually more interesting.
Across this work, I’m exploring what we inherit, what we repeat without noticing, and what we become responsible for once we start paying attention to the roots presently at our feet.
Playing House
As a child, I knew this little house as my playhouse.
As an adult, I learned it had been a home for enslaved people.
Those two truths belong to the same building. My happy memories don’t tell its whole story.
Revisiting it in graduate school meant looking again at a place where I felt safe and recognizing how little I understood. I’m returning to it now through drawing, research, and questions about whose stories I know and whose are missing. What was I told? What did I never think to ask? What do I need to learn before I make something from this history?
In recovery, I began learning to recognize what I avoided and the stories I told myself to stay comfortable. Masking, mirroring, and people pleasing to make a dollar at design. That experience shapes how I approach this work today. It asks me to notice when affection, familiarity, ego, or a beautiful image makes it easier to look away.
Working in an age of AI brings these questions into my design practice. I see possibilities for exploring, making connections, and giving ideas form. I also see how quickly we can make something convincing without understanding what it represents.
What source material are we drawing from? Whose perspective is missing? What are we inventing, and have we made that clear? When an image feels true, what makes us believe it? What becomes our responsibility once we know more?
The speed of making is changing, probably while I type this. We remain responsible for what we make, the stories it carries, and what it leaves out.
