Creating has always been a way for me to understand myself and the world around me. I find that I’m drawn to very specific symbols, colors, and characters, but it’s often not until after I’ve made the work and have a healthy distance from it that I can clearly understand why I made it in the manner I did (and honestly, sometimes that epiphany never comes). These images were created as part of a humorous and handmade set design project- the characters were secondary in my mind to the worlds that I was building. When I showed the final body of work, a professor pointed out that it had appeared that I had created tableaux of heaven and hell.

When she said this something clicked into place for me. I assumed that the work was just a result of me playing around and exploring fantasy sets and characters, and maybe it was, but this comment opened the door to more possibilities- why am I drawn to poking fun at religious motifs, and the binary choice of heaven or hell in this case? Why was it important to me to depict God as a soft, feminine character in a lush environment? Why did I settle on an image of the Devil taking a selfie and not something more sinister?

I think there are a lot of potential answers to these questions- most involving a combination of my religious upbringing, my queer identity, and my tendency to cope via laughter- but the beauty of making this work for me was that it organically encouraged me to question myself, play, and realize that what I create when I’m clowning around in the studio can often be more poignant than I realize at the time.