Inside My Mind

In Inside My Mind, I confront vulnerability head-on. The series began as a deep dive into my own struggles with shyness and anxiety. Specifically, the fear of placing my inner life into the external world. What if my internal dialogue was visible, not in words, but in marks, lines, and shapes? The result was a language of abstraction, a system of emotional mapping rendered in wax and pigments. Each painting focuses on a specific train of thought- this may be worry about a loved one or a critical self-judgement that I focus on through the process. The titles of the paintings give clues to what these inner dialogues were. I begin with quick, uninhibited marks—immediate gestures that capture a raw emotion. I turn these marks into stencils, which I bury beneath layers of encaustic wax. The wax protects and conceals, like the layers we build up to guard ourselves. When I peel away the stencil, I reveal what was hidden beneath, allowing the original marks to emerge as symbols of exposure and release. This process is both therapeutic and unsettling. These paintings embody the conflict between the desire to speak and the instinct to hide. What results is a negotiation between fear and courage that defines the act of revealing oneself.