My work examines the distance between what people say they value and what they are willing to preserve.

Belief is expressed through language, but it becomes visible through action: through what receives attention, protection, space, sacrifice, and time. What a culture carries forward is evidence of what it has decided matters. What it allows to disappear is evidence as well.

I work across painting, installation, found language, participation, and spatial practice. The work often begins with materials, gestures, or forms that are easily overlooked: handwriting, discarded objects, private appeals, familiar symbols, and ordinary systems. By altering their scale, duration, arrangement, or context, I change the conditions under which they are encountered. What was peripheral becomes unavoidable.

My central body of work, KEPT, begins with a contradiction I can't put down. Prayer is one of the most urgent things a person ever does, and one of the most carelessly discarded. We say our prayers are with the grieving and move on. We light a candle and let it burn out. We write one down and it is swept away within weeks. The words are treated as sacred and the trace of them as trash. KEPT refuses that. Handwritten prayers left in public are preserved, with consent, and translated onto raw linen at architectural scale, exactly as written. Misspellings stay. Pressure stays. Ink color stays. Hesitation stays. The original tag remains with the painting. I make the work as though these words were already received.

Preservation is not neutral. To place something in a collection, archive, museum, or home is to authorize its continuation. It is to decide that an object, image, or record should remain available to the future.

My work considers the evidence belief leaves behind: in language, ritual, contradiction, devotion, neglect, and the things human beings choose not to let disappear.

A painting can hang on a wall for three hundred years. A prayer, more often, lasts a moment.

I keep them.