My three year old son said fuck for the first time and my husband and I thought it was pretty hilarious.

The Neo-Tantric artists of the 60s and 70s in India have been a super important influence in my practice, specifically G.R. Santosh and Mahirwan Mamtani.

I would say yes. Specifically because I am my target audience and most of my close artist friends are also parents of young kids and so my community of critics is also my audience.

In my more recent work I’ve taken casts of myself and friends’s pregnant bodies, in the third trimester at our most ripe form and glued them on to panels. This was never a foreseen direction in my work but the feeling of being pregnant and giving birth was such an overpowering experience that I felt I had to use those forms that came from me and my community as conceptual and formal elements to work upon in my practice. I have enjoyed taking these casts and incorporating them in my work because it has brought me even closer to my subject matter.

My mum was a full-time mother and made her art on the side so I didn’t have a model of being a full-time working artist and therefore I was very hesitant to have kids and waited until I had secure income before deciding to try to get pregnant. With respect to my own parents I knew that I would be more selfish than my own mum and knew that I wanted more time in the studio, so my career came first but that’s not to say that I have any judgement for those who had or choose to put family first. One choice is not better than the other.

I decided to start working with and casting actual bodies and putting them in the paintings because I wanted to feel a more immediate connection to my own body, and as a way to continuously process the experience of being pregnant and giving birth. At the moment I am trying to figure out how to incorporate my abstracted lexicon of mandorlas, ogees and such into the realism of cast pregnant bodies.

Those two experiences are currently being explored simultaneously in my work in that they both happened to me so recently. I haven’t finished examining birthing, and the experience of giving birth is inextricably linked to my postpartum self.

It is hard as an artist to look at ones career in any kind of whole or totality in that in the studio I’m just trying to be present with the work. That being said, to be honest, I am at the moment having some trouble seeing my past work, current cast bodies, and my not-so-distant more abstracted paintings as being a larger whole. So I guess in a way it has been like giving birth, where I left my old self behind and I’m trying to figure out who I am now.

Within my paintings there’s both an illusory light and actual play of light on the sculptural forms, and that duality is one of the aspects that I’m interested in pulling in a viewer with. And also for sure, I agree with the question, I’m definitely interested in encouraging the viewer to see the female form from multiple perspectives. But, that’s a happy byproduct of working within a low-relief painting space and not my driving factor for making the work.

The earthy tones are to keep the cast bodies in the realistic space that they come from. The light filled orbs are the transportive element that is a kind of conceptual device that for me represents the open and vulnerable sensations that come along with being a new parent.

I’m working on a show for Pace’s new Seoul gallery space and towards a few museum shows in California for 2023. I’m also in the process of trying to figure out how to make sculptures in the round as opposed to my sculpted paintings that sit on the wall.