Packet #1
Stop Making Sense
Embroidered Typography, Red Thread, Fast Iteration July 2023
Kairos / Kronos or God’s Time / Our TIme
Plant Life
Serpent Fern, Fresco/Vector Brush Illustration, Photograph Hawaii August 2023
Pattern Making, need to learn how to make repeats
Rubbing / Place Documentation
Wooden Engraving from the door of the Aulani Hotel, Room number 746
Documenting/ Archiving/ Memory capture
Iterate - Bring this to the RISO
Packet #2
Moodboard for Cuidado/ Cuidate explorations
A wedding cake merged with a safety cone. A wedding cake that looks like a beautiful disaster covered in safety glass. An emergency manual for when you find yourself in the blast radius of your partners undealt with trauma
Rings of Intimacy
A graphic illustration of the rings of intimacy, with the self at the center, and the rings representing fields of intimate proximities. When we eminate joy or pain, or explode with trauma, those closest to the center feel it the most.
Stop Making Sense
A syllabus for remembering. Building a pedagogical framework, alongside a process of exploration. Process documentation.
Click for PDF.
Packet #3
Psalm of The Cover Girls
Inspired by the Cover Girls’ Lyrics “Show Me.” This image of praying hands expresses a hyper-feminine female identity that is shamelessly ’80s vintage glam. The lyrics are a plea to be “shown” love, instead of the lies, false promises, and verbal manipulations that were previously presented as love. The Cover Girls/ Freestyle music and catholicism are part of the Chicana/Chulita cultural patchwork of the 80s.
Packet #4
The Ulysses Pact
A visual representation of the challenges and brokeness that happen in all marriages, is explicitly mentioned in traditional wedding vows, but on the day of marital commitment is obscured by tiers of buttercream, carefully chosen filling flavors, and a soft veneer of tafetta, lace and the scent of freshly cut flowers.
Mother’s Smile
Glitched photos, collaged, and printed with a desktop printer and RISO. An illustration for a poem of the same name. Thinking about imprinting, print runs as a “generation,” old ways and new ways of making and repeating connects to the theme of generational trauma.
The Cake photograph concept blends a vintage kitsch wedding aesthetic with more broken glass, and 2 champagne flutes one broken, one obscured.
This image will be used as a cover for a printed zine/journal that contains curated writings from packets 1-5 that were thoughts, ideas, and processes that led to this image.
The title “Don’t Try This At Home” comes from an introductory essay that compares the reality of living through infidelity trauma vs damaging and one-dimensional affair narratives that often exist in mainstream media.
Packets becoming publications
The Altar photograph repeats the vintage kitsch aesthetic but this time the elements make reference to home altars and religious practice—however what is desired, and to whom the prayer is made is purposely unclear. While the language looks heavily Catholic there is no Catholic iconography and various elements nod toward a different sense of the divine. The Aztec God Xōchipilli (the flower prince) is associated with flowers, art, writing and music, given his association with these “feminine qualities” he is also the patron God of homosexuality/queerness. His twin sister Xōchiquetzal (the feather princess) is associated with fertility, beauty and love she is a representative of human desire, pleasure, and excess, appearing also as patroness of artisans involved in the manufacture of luxury items.
The image will be used as a cover for a printed zine featuring writings from packets 1-5 were thoughts that drove the creation of this image originated.
The Title “Don’t Get Any Big Ideas” is the opening song lyric from “Nude” by Radiohead. It is the title of the first essay which describes how patriarchy, misogyny, and homophobia are trafficked into the family through Church—and speculates why those ideas are there in the first place. Additional writing describes incidents in which I was personally reprimanded for challenging those ideas, having my own ideas, and the ways their insidious ideas still got their hooks in me so many years later.
I started sorting my packet writing and notes into manuscripts for 3 zines/publications.
Don’t Try This At Home - A Memoir on Marriage & Infidelity
Don’t Get Any Big Ideas - A Memoir on Identity, Church Hurt, and claiming my spiritual birthright
Stop Making Sense - A syllabus for remembering - A supportive document for teaching designers how to be artists again—how to do for ourselves what we do so well for others. Cuidate. This document is informed by the Imago Dei-sign framework of personal storytelling using design language, and empathetic witnessing/ reflecting.
