Fruitcake!!!
2024

The patterns used for this puppet were fully self drafted, made using a series of paper prototypes and then scaling up.

I started with a foam base for the head, then made the skin out of fleece, additional details such as the eyes, mouth, and shirt, were created using felt and an old t-shirt. The hair started as a crocheted wig cap essentially, and hair was individually attached to that. The puppet features multiple piercings which were added using large gauge jump rings and rivets.

Fruitcake is a member of the fictional band 'Fruit Fiends' which there is a logo and shirt for, featuring a durian, persimmon, and fig. Since the creation of the band, they have remained experimental, with each album showcasing the strengths and style of a different member.

What is Fruitcake's role in this band? They are the bassist, though they started as the drummer. Most of the members float around various roles in the band, but Fruitcake has never stepped up to sing lead. The album they took the lead on features a fast rhythm and loud screechy guitar sounds, throwing off the fans when it was released without announcing who directed the sound. They have a lively and quirky personality.

Snoobert aka Snoob!
2025

This is my second ever puppet out of my current 4.5 that I've made!!! I referenced my small paper prototypes from when I made Fruitcake to make a smaller scale puppet. She felt more customizable due to the smaller scale, and so I was a little more ambitious in some areas.

It's important to note just how much detail she has, such as the fur I used for her hair. I made the hair in 5 parts, the back, the two front pieces on either side of the part, and the two long side pieces. It was dyed using watered down tie dye, and then attached layer by layer.

Onto the clothes, I made a multilayered skirt using cinched patterned fabric, with a tulle underlayer for pizazz! I made the removeable leg warmers out of an old tshirt and more scraps, with elastic sewed into the top as an extra precaution so they don't fall off. The top is crocheted and strung with yarn in the back reminiscent of a corset. The yellow bow was made by my friend and sewn on as a finishing touch.

She is my little superstar, and based off of little doodles I made in the margins of my papers. I love her dearly, and she is my love letter to being girly and playing dress up, especially with my mom.

Bugs of the Forest
2025

This series of masks were made using paper mache on a wire armature, and tied using strips of leather. The bugs they are based on are a Hercules Beetle, Blue Morpho Butterfly, and a Chinese Mantis. They were chosen to give a variety of face structures, giving a small sample of the vast world of bugs and their apperances.

The masks were originally made for a photoshoot in a local park, with the intention to showcase the beauty of creatures usually too small to notice. Bugs are the closest things to real life fairies, and they bring a sort of magic to the spaces where they live, filling summers with bright colors and noises of life.

Wind Song
2026

This piece was created for one of my college art foundations classes, with the goal to be creating a sculptural nonsite based on a walk taken prior to project ideation. Wind Song represents the wind that swirls and rushes through the air on even the most quiet of days. Made from wire and leaves, a combination of the wind’s movement and the noise created by it, such as leaves and wind chimes.

The spirals not only represent the tracked movements of leaves in the breeze, but the ornamental swoops and curls of the railings and fences in the neighborhoods I walked through. They warped slightly out of shape, and the imperfection of the wire captures the feeling of being blown around and worn down. The delicacy of the piece is meant to show the fleeting moments that wind creates, bringing leaves and birds and bugs into a temporary dance.

My Body is Rotting!!!
2026

This piece is influenced by two of my favorite creatives, author Mary Roach, and painter Hilma af Klint. Roach's books explore a vairety of topics, but my favorite ones, such as Stiff and Replaceable You, explore the body. af Klint's work deals a lot with abstraction but also natural studies, and so I incorporated the abstraction of organs to vaguely bug-like shapes. The intention behind it was to explore the feeling of wanting to take out parts of your body to replace the parts that are less flattering, whether to the self or to others.

The organs in question are butterfly lungs, a wasp nest heart, leech stomach, and millipede intestines. While not the traditional colors of the bugs, the color palette was intended to stay as close to the fleshy bloody grossness that is inside the body as possible, with the exception of the heart. The wasp nest symbolizes the buzzing of a restless heart with the realization of discomfort and living with it. The butterfly is nerves, and the leech is a neverending hunger for answers. Lastly, the millipeded begs for an escape, to stretch its legs and crawl out of the prison it lives in. The body lacks all natural color on the outside, a mere husk of what it once was or what it is supposed to be.

A Zine is a DIY Self Publication
2026

Zines, short for magazine, are self produced, non professional expressions of self, dating back to Thomas Paines Common Sense. My Wunderkammer project displays my collection, both of my own and other artists’, zines, accumulated from friends and art markets. For the past few years, I have been intensely invested in the culture and history of zines, and I love taking every opportunity to introduce this world of self published media to others. They have been an outlet for my emotions, bad poetry, silly ideas, and things I am passionate about. Getting to have others work has become important as an extension, because supporting artists and participating in the community I so dearly love means the world to me. Zines create an opportunity for me to see a snapshot of someone else’s interests and life, and in turn sparks my own curiosity about the subjects. Taking inspiration from zine libraries and how libraries in general display works, with popular titles being spotlighted, my display will be functional for display and storage. My work will focus on longevity and interactivity, and will have blank zines for the audience to interact with, showing the community that zinemakers are a part of. Since one of the core pillars of making a zine is that they are easily distributed, copies of zines will be available for the viewer to take with them, giving a brief overview of some of my work. There is such a wide variety of approaches to producing one, and while my project is not an in-depth presentation of everything there is to know, I hope that the audience leaves feeling inspired to express themselves in the physical medium of paper booklets.