Artist Statement:

My artistic practice is rooted in transformation and the dissolution of boundaries between life forms, echoing Surrealism’s fascination with metamorphosis and the unconscious. This instinct for hybridization has deep ancestral echoes. My grandmother was born in Transylvania, and from a young age I was steeped in the region’s myths, especially the lore surrounding Dracula. The vampire, neither fully alive nor dead, both feared and desired, embodies the liminal spaces that captivate my work.  The mythologies passed down to me weren’t just stories, but psychological landscapes where identity, desire, and the unknown coexisted. Embracing and exploring the “shadow” of my unconscious is an important aspect of my art practice.

As a child, I was also enchanted by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid: a tale of transformation, sacrifice, and selfhood that mirrored the hybrid, feminine figures I identified with from Eastern European folklore. The mermaid’s dissolution into sea foam resonated as a symbol of choosing one’s path at great personal cost, and affirmed my belief in the power of resisting containment. The path of my life as an artist reflects this core belief of following one's inner guide or intuition, even if it involves sacrificing aspects of material comforts.

I find kinship with the Symbolists’ inner mythologies and the psychological abstraction of mid-century modernism. My practice bridges figurative and abstract modes, weaving together science, spirituality, and aesthetics in a manner reminiscent of Hilma af Klint’s visionary abstraction. Esoteric philosophies, especially Kundalini yoga, inform my exploration of altered states of consciousness and energetic transformation. I have been practicing Kundalini yoga since 2019 and the symbolism of the serpent as the coiled life energy which when elevated, allows one to experience an altered and elevated perspective, has started to manifest in my work. Like meditation, art is a practice that opens the door to a transcendent state of awareness and allows me to peer into another realm. The sculptures I create are artifacts of that exploration.

Visually, my work draws from the ornate precision of Ernst Haeckel’s biological illustrations and the dreamlike folklore of my Eastern European roots. My figurative watercolors use layered translucence to evoke spectral presences, while my sculptural works embrace the ornamental exuberance of the Baroque and Art Nouvea, styles historically feminized, reclaiming them as vessels of power and transformation. Across media, hybridity remains my central aesthetic and philosophical inquiry: a space where boundaries dissolve, identities intermingle, and material states shift, unsettling the lines between self and other, myth and biology, flesh and spirit.