Cetacea
For a full year, I was captivated by a recurring form that kept emerging in my monoprints—a small, abstract shape, somewhere between a figure, a creature, and what I came to call a “little monster.” Though I couldn’t identify it at first, the motif appeared in dozens of prints, like an ongoing, intuitive conversation with my body—something surfacing from just beneath my awareness.
It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with a severe thyroid illness that I recognized the shape. It resembled a butterfly—uncannily like the thyroid gland itself. Around that same time, in June 2024, news broke of the largest dolphin stranding in U.S. history, right in the town of Wellfleet, MA where I was staying. While I was deeply ill and navigating recovery, I began documenting the decaying dolphins that washed ashore on the island at the end of my street.
Over the course of that summer, I found myself in parallel processes of observation, decay, and transformation. As I slowly regained my health, I began combining the intuitive imagery of my monoprints—the symbolic thyroid forms—with the visceral documentation of the dolphins' bodies. These two threads, both intimate and ecological, converged into a new body of work exploring fragility, embodiment, and the porous boundary between personal and environmental breakdown.