Religion is often presented to children as safety, love, and peace, yet the stories they color and memorize are full of blood, martyrdom, and punishment. Riddled with religious guilt, I grew up with the fear of God nailed into me at a young age, with the belief that all youth are free of sin and the need to die young to preserve purity.

My works return to this childhood, recreating a classroom corner complete with bright bulletin-board decor, a word wall, and an activity table stocked with custom crayons and worksheets of religious figures. At first glance the space is playful and familiar; over time, the language and imagery reveal how devotion is taught through fear, surveillance, and “kid-friendly” versions of violence. I use classroom aesthetics with added blood and guts to mirror how religious ideas quietly structure a child’s sense of self long before they can name it. Viewers are invited to sit, color, and read, inhabiting the gap between what adults intend to teach and what children actually absorb.

“A bat only knows how to be a bat” from Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? reflects my own experience: I only know how to be an artist from inside my body and history, and I cannot fathom what it is like to be anything else.

My world is built from childhood cancer, religion, and the feeling of drawing my way back to a time I never quite got to have of innocence. I don’t know the Lord the way believers say they do, but I know the pull I feel toward crucifixes, crayons, and “My First Bible” branding. Ever since a study abroad trip to Spain in 2025, I’ve been infatuated not with God, but with the structure of religion and what it does to children—work that led from drawings of crucifixion to pieces like a sliding puzzle version of Christ, translating violence into “kid-friendly” form.

I move between flat work and 3D, treating failure as draft rather than verdict. I’m drawn to thrift-store devotional objects, children’s religious kitsch, and the uncanny softness of sanitized violence. I’m pursuing an MFA to deepen this practice and to become an art professor, building classrooms that allow both structure and strange obsession, especially for students navigating disability, illness, or economic limits. In the end, I return again to the bat: an artist only knows how to be an artist from within their own life, and mine is shaped by hospital rooms, devotional imagery, and the act of making itself.