I am an artist of service, healing, disruption, and magic. I weave disciplines of acoustic sound, electronics, poetry, activism, and performance art. I draw inspiration from my intersecting identities, namely being transgender, queer, neurodivergent, white, and a witch. My art asks: How do I translate my experience of liminality? How can I use my privilege to dismantle structures of oppression? How can trauma be alchemized to build nourishing and affirming futures? How can I engage an audience to come closer to themselves? I explore these questions through mediums such as ritual performance art, acoustic chamber and choral music — often interlaced with electronics, and multimedia theater spaces.
I am often interested in crafting an immersive experience for an audience that blurs the line between performer and listener as a tactic to get audience members to reflect intimately on themselves. My work is inspired by my experiences or the experiences of those close to me. Sometimes this is directly narrative, such as my performance art piece about being on testosterone, while other times I abstractly explore human conditions. I work with many myths, filtering them through my own experience. Even when working with old stories, I am interested in queering the narratives and situating their lessons in our current social context.
My compositional voice ranges from thorny and intense to ethereal and gentle, with influences from classical avant-garde, jazz, late romanticism, minimalism, theatrical progressive rock, and metal. I choose the genre, style, and instrumentation of my pieces largely based on the extra-musical intentions I have for the piece and the unique, individual talents of the musicians with whom I work. While the style may be flexible, all of my work is interested in timbre, storytelling, and affective experiences.
I make art as an act of service. My art does not need the discourse of academic cisgender white men to have value. When I write for my transgender community choir, I am fitting to their voices, finding the delight in their queer vocal cords. The music I write for my trans choir kneels before them and asks, How can I serve your perfect being — the soul of your voice?
I make art to disrupt structures of oppression. My music has featured boys in dresses next to saxophones, prescription label collages amid chaotic electronic soundscapes of dysphoria, and intramuscular testosterone injections under expansive, life-giving harmonics. It has mourned trans murder victims and challenged the Christians who told my friend she must have committed a sin to have a child with Down syndrome. It has screamed at the onslaught of xenophobic news with granulated recordings of politicians and pleaded with white people to recognize the racialized violence of our culture. My art is never enough.
I make art as an act of ritual, as an act of world-building. My art burns with mythological fire. I fill gardens with flutes, brass instruments, clarinets, dancers, singers, and actors for my trans-ancestors, tearing through notes at the shattering of the world and whispering delightful fae dances that escape definition. I cast circles in performance and invoke the wild. From this space between worlds, the veils are thin; I see the crumbling of present structures and I sing my devotion beyond, invoking new colors and the completeness of our tomorrows.