My work engages craft-based processes—clay, textiles, glass, and collage— to explore social surfaces and cultural histories of queer spaces and nightlife. Through research, documentation, and making, I explore the transient yet powerful role of nightlife spaces as sites of joy and resilience.
The various bodies of work that I have focused on for the past five years engage with the physicality and ephemerality of queer nightlife spaces by documenting aspects of the queer experience which are often seen as mundane or ordinary. Much of the research process of the work engages with both archaeological and anthropological forms, such as interviews, site visits, and documentation. The sculptural objects or installations I create engage with the historical function, role, or value of the materials or spaces. Such as jacquard weavings created by a computerized loom, whose woven images are derived from photos of floors from queer nightlife spaces. Referencing tapestries function as historical records or decorative objects, subverted by the pictorial depiction of debris and residual trace of queer experiences.
For over a decade, I’ve photographed and archived fragments of queer nightlife, informing installations where textile and glass sculpture, ceramics, and collage transform found spaces with queer histories. Using printed photographs on fabric, porcelain, 24k gold embroidery, and fused glass collected from queer bars, I create poetic memorials to honor the beauty, impact and impermanence of nightlife queer exchanges.
In Many Moons, disco balls photographed over 14 years form celestial constellations and supernovas—metaphors for queer existence beyond heteronormative structures. These works embrace both euphoria and melancholy, celebrating traces of joy while affirming the necessity of these spaces. By weaving materials, memory, and place, my work illuminates queer spaces as realms of possibility—where identity, community, and resistance take shape, however briefly or deeply, under the glow of the night.
