The Cave

"Little girls don't stay little forever. They grow into strong women that return to destroy your world." - Kyle Stephens, sexual assault survivor of Larry Nassar

The initial impetus for the creation of The Cave came in the aftermath of the calculated and horrifying moment in history that was the overturning of Roe V. Wade on June 24, 2022, which had protected safe and legal abortion access in the United states for more than fifty years.
However, it became clear to me early on in this process that The Cave couldn’t just be about reproductive rights. It’s about bodily autonomy- who gets to have access to it and who does not. Each piece and grouping speaks in different ways to this overarching theme, but I invite you, viewer, to make your own connections. The pieces here, both 2- and 3-dimensional, are intentionally amorphous, even when they seem to evoke something familiar or specific. That is because we all bring our personal histories with us, and if there’s anything that I hope for with this work, it’s that we are, each of us, able to be a little softer, a little more vulnerable, than we were before.

The meaning of The Cave is twofold, a double entendre. First, it’s a reference to Plato’s conception of The Cave as a metaphor for the ignorance of humanity, that we all live in this cave, watching the drama of shadows playing against the walls with flickering firelight, and we believe that this is reality. The best we can hope for in such a scenario, is to become one of the puppeteers that manipulates the shadow puppets for the others to stare at. But outside the cave, if only we make the decision to leave, the whole beautiful world waits for us in all its nuance and variation.
The second reference is cheeky, I point not to the world outside, but the world that exists under someone’s clothing. I leave it to you to determine what cave that might be and how you’d like to explore it (or not- that’s fine too.)

Notes and questions on process I asked myself as I worked on each piece can be found in the heading of the individual sections.