Through my ongoing Blends project, I explore the liminal spaces of cultural identity, creating a cartography of connection rendered through layers of luminous abstraction. From the stories people share with me about their cultural and ethnic backgrounds, I create paintings that serve as thresholds, concealing and revealing intricate topographies of personal and collective memory.

Pigmented epoxy resin is my primary language, a translucent medium that speaks to the complexity of hybrid experiences. Working responsively between the words of my contributors and the shapes their stories conjure, I stack layers of colored resin to develop unified compositions. As I mix pigments and layer organic shapes in response to inherited narratives, I am tracing invisible genealogies in the subtle migrations of color and fluid boundaries. The work doesn't simply represent cultural intersections; it performs those intersections, allowing disparate elements to merge and ultimately transform.

My process is deliberate and contemplative, mixing paint into resin with a slow meditative build that mirrors the gradual revealing of personal histories. As light illuminates the layers, shapes become simultaneously individual and part of a blended whole, a metaphor for the way human beings are unique individuals with cultural identities that flow into and enrich one another.

Reflections on encounters and conflict in my own experiences as a mixed-race woman informed the initiative of this project, prompting introspection about the navigations of living with mixed identities in the United States. Through abstraction, I celebrate the beauty in human complexity while creating space for empathetic discourse. Each painting, exhibited alongside its anonymous story, becomes a living document of negotiation: between cultures, between inner and outer landscapes, between what is remembered and what is imagined.

These are not just paintings. They are intimate conversations about displacement, resilience, and the profound joy of finding oneself between worlds. Each piece is a contribution to the beautiful tapestry of humanity through its exploration of how we perceive and honor our connections to each other.