Expectations about beauty, gender, and otherness have shaped what I see when I look in the mirror, often loaded with a feeling of not being enough. Self-portraiture has been the tool I use to learn a new way to view myself as a trans man based in celebration, acceptance, and internal truth. Using still imagery, collage and video, my work aims to create a conversation regarding transition that goes beyond a single destination, and reflect an ongoing, multifaceted experience that is a vital part of our human ecology. It explores the landscape, masculine and feminine gender norms, and the mirrors that we construct to view ourselves, both literal and imaginary. 

Working within the natural world has been one of my greatest teachers in reclaiming residence within myself. Nature has no gender. Nature is beauty, and it is also decay and metamorphosis.  Using water, plants, and soil as my reflection, I am reminded of the dynamic ecosystem of my existence; one that includes beauty as much as ugliness. Nature becomes my mirror.  

While attending an artist residency at Sitka Center in 2020 I sought refuge in the coastal forests of Cascade Head. 2020 was also the start of a surge in legislation seeking to deny access to basic healthcare, education, athletics, and bathrooms to trans individuals. The work I started at Sitka sought a landscape of belonging at a time when laws passed were enforcing the contrary. The result was a new body of work including The Place Between, a fold out photobook of 16 photographs connecting the body to place in an ever changing landscape.   

In 2022, while recovering from a month-long case of poison oak, I began to photograph myself covered in blisters, integrating my physical discomfort with scans of oak trees. Through collage my work began to evolve from a trans body in nature, to a trans body as nature. The cutting away is not a removal, but highlighting certain parts of my body I still grapple with.  

I invite the viewer to join me in my process, in the hope that they leave with a deeper permission to exist as a vital, celebrated (and also sometimes ugly, decomposing) part of the landscape that holds us all.