This is how we spend time
together these days.

This is how we spend time together these days follows years of my interpersonal relationships and explores the ways traditional gender roles fracture our ability to build sturdy, romantic connections with the people we love. I use needle and thread to embroider the printed photographs, and through these small, delicate gestures of embroidery, I alter the printed images in an attempt to investigate the complexity of intimacy and the ways that our experiences of closeness become increasingly fragile and personal the more that we reflect on them.
Serving as an alternative to self-injury and a quiet way of expressing feelings of confusion and hurt, my performative gestures center around the body, both my body and the bodies of people with whom I am intimate. My exhibited photographic works are tactile and three-dimensional and reveal a labor-intensive process, mapping a secret history of craft and labor politics. These works ask a series of questions: What does my needlework say about the way I was taught to deal with difficult emotions? How is the construct of gender ingrained into our psyche? And how does this manifest within intimacy?