This body of paintings was created for The SNARL, a two-person exhibition at the Rourke Art Museum in Moorhead, MN.

My mother taught me that the longer you

keep that howl trapped inside your body,

the more wolf you become,

but she never showed me how to let the howl out.

Womanhood is also this:

a violence louder on the inside that it is on the outside.

Smiling when truly all you are doing

is baring your teeth.

 Poem by Nikita Gill, This Wild Violence Visits Again

 These self-portraits delve into a primal place in which the female body exists; a place of physicality, yearning, resilience and agency.  We continually evolve, raised with narratives on which we must push back, our bodies shaped by fluctuations and a nearly endless capacity to endure, love and protect.

 These self-portraits convey gestures of balance, containment, vulnerability and control, or lack thereof. I am navigating in-between spaces and that I am both hard and soft, dark and light, unmasked and barefaced.