My themes in my current body of work (the medicine body) are about my mission to defend dignity, autonomy, and agency over the chronically ill and disabled body, while exploring the urgent need to inject true care into Western medicine. Rooted in personal experience navigating the healthcare system with small fiber nerve degradation and dysautonomia caused by rare autoimmune diseases, my practice critiques the clinical coldness that often replaces human empathy—reclaiming care as both a right and a radical act.

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It’s important to me as an artist that I create with symbolic materials that allude to the concept behind each piece. Notably in my recent installation "Waiting Room Wall Murmurs" : Glass - as the fragile patient waiting to be caught or dropped, and Nitrile - as the decider of fates, the gatekeeper of wellbeing, the personal Jesus whom we’ll all grit our teeth and wallow at their feet for life altering care and treatment. These metaphors create a language of power imbalance, reflecting how patients are too often at the mercy of medical institutions that hold their fate, held in these delicate yet terribly uncomfortable and even painful situations. In these dynamics, the chronically ill body becomes a passive object—observed, judged, and controlled—rather than a subject with agency and voice.  I reflect the stark power imbalance that defines many patients’ relationships to medical systems. These forms echo a lived reality: one where patients are expected to surrender agency in exchange for treatment, care, or survival. And the physician rests beneath a mask of ethics. Notably, there is no longer a standard hippocratic oath in the West. There is a great variety of ethical standards in the west. Some colleges such as Harvard, go so far as to expect physicians to create their very own tailored code of ethics to swear by upon graduation.

 

Two themes drive this body of work: defending autonomy and restoring care.

 

The first—defending dignity, agency, and autonomy—responds to how patients describe their healthcare experience: feeling like bystanders in their own lives. As The Body Keeps the Score explains, “agency is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life.” That feeling is too often stripped from disabled people, especially when their voice is replaced by those who presume to speak for them. The assumption that disabled individuals lose the right to agency simply because their body is in flux is not only incorrect—it’s dehumanizing. Disability, at its core, is isolating because society often erases the lived experience of embodiment. Able-bodied people tend to take control over their bodies for granted. But disability is not rare—it’s part of the human condition. Everyone, if they live long enough, will face bodily breakdown. And yet, when that time comes, most will confront the painful reality of being disregarded. My work challenges this gatekeeping of embodiment and invites able-bodied viewers to consider what it means to lose control—and to regain it on their own terms.

 

The second theme—injecting care into Western medicine—critiques how clinical detachment is mistaken for professionalism. In the absence of compassion, medical errors rise and emotional harm becomes inevitable. Patients remember how they were treated long after a diagnosis. Words carry weight, especially when spoken by someone in anatomical power. I’ve been collecting ableist quotes from outdated medical texts and MD-authored materials, collaging them into my pieces as a historical record of the medical gaslighting that shapes so many lives, such as in my recent installation "From the Cracks of the System" . By using these texts against themselves, I aim to dismantle inherited biases that persist in modern care.

 

This work is not only for the representation of the disabled viewer. While I hope it will be a place patients sit around to exchange stories and support - this work is made especially with doctors in mind. It is a mirror held up to the clinical gaze. I want them to understand how utterly and completely the barriers they can carelesslessly throw up in one moment can follow a patient around and trip them up for the rest of their life within the system. It seems easy to some of them to forget how much power a practitioner has over another’s future—but I will not let that be forgotten. This body of work is a form of care in itself, and a call to reform and infuse the clinical with glimmering beacons of humanity.

 

I hope to become, through both my gallery work and as a future art therapist, the caring figure I never had access to in the system—a guide, a witness, and a source of strength for other chronically ill and disabled patients.

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My mission in life is to do what I can to help recreate and reform healthcare with an emphasis on the wellbeing of the patient. I want to help patients reclaim their sense of agency. I want to help people conquer sunset syndrome head on with creativity and love.

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