Art and Art History Majors | Will Rice College

When I was a little girl, I would shop for toys in stacks of fashion magazines.  Not with a red marker in hand, looking to circle items for my Christmas wish list, but for repurposed paper families of my own creation.  Every figure, every item could be cut out and made a part of my paper dollhouse, my characters given new life, finding their home in a composition book, room-pages decorated with furniture and two-dimensional walls adorned with my hand-drawn floral wallpaper.  Each doll had her name written on the back, first and last, as they were all part of solely female families, mothers and daughters living undisturbed between the pages of my black book.  After all, there are almost no men in fashion magazines, and I was fine with that.  What little girl wants a boy doll when the object of her game is to play with miniature versions of herself, past, present, and future?  There was a matriarchal power breathing within those magazines that drew me to them, and I liked to imagine that each doll was a product of immaculate conception, free of any male influence even from her genesis.  This was my perfect society of Woman untouched.

My work as an artist at Rice mirrors the recontextualized paper dollhouses of my youth.  From my choice to primarily utilize the imagery of the female body to my collaged scrapbook backgrounds, my work is an ode to maximalist stagnation, an amber-trapped relic of Girlhood.

Research Interests: I'd like to further visually explore the concept of young femininity through painting, drawing, and collage.