"That's Identity, Baby" is a body of work that explores abstraction as a language of identity shaped by grief, sexuality, discovery, and the feeling of being otherworldly, almost alien. Each piece becomes a poetic terrain: a visual interpretation of emotional and spatial states, echoing cosmic landscapes, matter, and space. These abstract compositions are not just formal exercises but deeply personal, cryptic self-portraits that translate a multifaceted sense of self into layered, expressive environments.

While rooted in abstraction, this body of work is also deeply informed by my lived experience with mental health. Making has become a quiet ritual, an emotional release, a space where internalized pressure and psychological unrest can be transformed into form, texture, and gesture. Art-making functions as both expression and refuge; it allows me to externalize the invisible weight of emotional complexity, such as oscillations between numbness and overwhelm, stillness, and noise.

The therapeutic urgency in my approach to material layering, cutting, rearranging, and reclaiming fragments becomes a metaphor for navigating the internal fragmentation I often experience. The interplay of spontaneity and control mirrors the tensions of my inner life, the struggle to hold things together while parts of me remain in flux. In this way, the work visualizes identity and charts the contours of a psychic landscape shaped by emotional turbulence, memory, and the search for grounding.

My sense of being different from existing outside normative structures filters through the work subtly. As a queer person, my relationship to identity has always felt multidimensional, sometimes dissonant, and often unspoken. These feelings of disconnection, of occupying liminal emotional and social spaces, are embedded in the work's atmospheres and structures. I lean into ambiguity not to obscure meaning but to allow for a layered, more honest articulation of self that resists simplification.

Ultimately, these pieces function as abstracted self-portraits: not literal likenesses but intimate terrains shaped by psychological depth, queerness, and the quiet labor of emotional survival. They reflect an ongoing process of becoming nonlinear, unresolved, and deeply human.