About

Fine Artist & Counselor-in-Training

As both an artist and a graduate student in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, my work lives at the intersection of creative repair and psychological resilience. I collect broken, discarded, or forgotten objects and reconstruct them using a process inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending with gold. However, rather than seeking to restore these items to a prior ideal, I invite surreal, dreamlike elements into the repairs—growths, distortions, even contradictions—symbolizing the nonlinear and often unexpected nature of healing.

​

My repairs are intentionally imperfect, irreverent, and often a bit absurd—because that's how healing feels. I'm drawn to the way our core beliefs, formed in childhood, quietly steer our lives: shaping how we interpret events, relationships, and our worth (Fenn, 2013). Rather than smoothing over the cracks, I highlight them, exaggerate them, or fill them with something unexpected. The process is deliberately ad-hoc—glue that drips, seams that do not line up, and additions that make no logical sense—mirroring how we often patch ourselves together with whatever tools are available. These choices are not mistakes; they are honest. They reflect how belief systems are formed and reformed through lived experience, not precision. Each object becomes a kind of visual punchline with a serious undertone: a playful, messy homage to the ways we carry our damage and keep going.

​

Through both art and counseling, I explore how damage can give way to depth, how resilience is not about returning to "before," but about becoming something new—and perhaps more truthful—than what existed prior to the break.

​

​

References: 

Fenn, K., & Byrne, M. (2013). The key principles of cognitive behavioural therapy. InnovAiT, 6(9), 579–585. https://doi.org/10.1177/1755738012471029