WIGGLE YOUR TOES (original painting)

30" x 38" acrylic on stretched raw canvas. Unframed. Certificate of authenticity included. 2023.

This piece is part of my 2023 series, Seven Stones.

I began making art in the dust of a life that had changed. I’d recently come out and moved away, shaking the beliefs I had grown up with into painful and prismatic questions. I was having panic attacks all the time and often carried a small rock in my pocket, something heavy and real when everything else seemed to be floating away. I said to a friend back then, "I want to make art, but I have nothing to say."

So, I began making work about the questions.

Seven Stones is the culmination of this friendship with the edges of what I’m able to explain, and the small stones that I’ve unearthed along the way. They are true in the sense that they help me stay open to the questions. Now, I carry them with me everywhere. HELLO BODY is my invitation to drift back from dissociation into this life, and WIGGLE YOUR TOES, the somatic cue connecting me to the parts of myself that are farthest away. I HAVE ALWAYS BELONGED TO ME provides a way to make friends with my past, while IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO COME HOME TO YOUR SELF is the promise that I have plenty of time. Though, it doesn’t always feel that way, so I carry ONE THING AT A TIME along with me, a gentle metronome, keeping time to a human-paced life. PLAY IS THE OPPOSITE OF SURVIVAL MODE is the bedrock of my healing, a place I can begin again, and again, steadied by the trust that I CAN KEEP MYSELF SAFE, which means I will stay by my own side no matter what comes.

I don’t know that I am the kind of person who can change the world, but if I could offer up one thing, it would be these stones, real and heavy, to the people I love, to you. I hope these works bring to you the steadiness and spark of possibility that they have to me.

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