My artistic practice is a spiritual and communal expedition into the liminal space between the Self and the Other through drawn animation and moving images. It is an act of confrontation with the forces that keep us separated from ourselves and from each other, challenging patriarchal, commercial, and colonial constraints that dictate who gets to tell stories and whose narratives stay hidden. Inspired by surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim, the photographer and street artist JR, and Métis animator Terril Calder, I use drawing to reclaim animation as a site of self-determined storytelling.
Rejecting the precision and uniformity of commercially manufactured animation, I embrace the drawn line as an act of intimacy and immediacy, a real-time record of the imperceptible revealing itself through movement. My hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animation expands the legacy of experimental animators like Faith Hubley, Kathy Rose, and Sally Cruikshank, who reclaimed animation as a medium of radical imagination, personal mythology, and feminist resistance. This meditative, intuitive approach allows me to construct my own evolving iconography of movement, gesture, and rhythm, creating visual narratives that exist for their own pleasure.
My practice integrates social participation, creating space for those whose stories, gestures, and emotions are erased or unwelcomed. In my ongoing project Blessed Are Those Who Are Angry, animated movement becomes the channel to a shared, living process of witnessing and transformation. I translate Fight, Flight, and Freeze responses into an animated mythology, externalizing desire, grief, and resilience as a collective experience of communal engagement and healing.
At the heart of this mythology is Ofeelia, my animated heroine, whose movement interrogates Western storytelling conventions while resonating with universal human emotion. Ofeelia’s presence is both deeply rooted in the language of female embodiment and accessible to those who have ever felt unseen or disrupted. Her animated form defies rigid, hierarchical storytelling, favoring a fluid, intuitive, and deeply alive presence that speaks to the emotional currents that move through all bodies, across all identities and histories.
Animation is not a dated medium facing obsolescence from increasingly efficient industrial technologies—it is a generative process of self-discovery and rediscovery, a breath that moves us toward agency and interconnection. By reclaiming animation as a mode for self-determination, my work deconstructs imposed narratives of constraint and separation and creates new embodiments of encounter—where movement itself draws us into a shared dance of liberation.