My work largely revolves around emotions and experiences, so I guess it's more about what it is to be human. Mainly it involves aspects of my own experiences of suffering from depression, such as coping mechanisms (Escape- my attempts to escape into other worlds) and associated feelings (Untitled- attempting to disappear into the surrounding environment, to hide). I also include elements of nostalgia (such as in another piece where I included paper dolls, which harking back to my childhood) and references to physical health, mainly to the ailments I have as a result of my fibromyalgia. I also include elements of mythology, and occasionally pop culture. The checkerboard pattern in Escape is in reference to a passage from Girl Interrupted by Susana Kaysen:

“The floor of ice cream parlor bothered me. It was black-and-white checkboard tile, bigger than supermarket checkboard. If I looked only at a white square, I would be all right, but it was hard to ignore the black squares that surrounded the white ones. The contrast got under my skin. The floor meant yes, no, this, that, up, down, day, night -all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor.”

Which is a problem I have with those patterns. The Untitled drawing makes reference to lunar phases (or rather, they literally frame the drawing) and makes reference to the symbolism of moths, being quite a dark symbol which transcends realms of being, and to some extent lunar goddesses which litter ancient religions. It also touches on the idea of freedom- freedom from life, from yourself, from reality.