My art is in its exploration stage. This includes still-life studies, abstract designs, traditional and digital paintings and prints, and jewelry designs. Formal studies are helping to expand my awareness of methods and mediums, which expands my portfolio in turn. I am currently pursuing an Associate's of Fine Arts, and plan on continuing art freelance after graduation.

The specific form my body of work most often takes is two-dimensional, whether through traditional or digital means. My preferred ones for traditional is graphite, ink wash, and watercolour, and my most frequently-used digital for illustration purposes. Even with these preferences, I appreciate exposure to and opportunities in using different mediums as I can't know now that it won’t be of interest in the future. Just last year I used a wax-dye resist method I’d learned about in high school for a recent costume, even though I hadn’t used it in between those two time frames. I’m sure I will revisit these other mediums, especially in mixed-media projects.

I find the intersection between two- and three-dimensional as made available through printmaking intriguing. A collagraph for example, is a two-dimensional, flat print made from a three-dimensional collage of different papers or materials attached to the plate, or the board that the ink is applied to. In Crane Collagraph, a print with two cranes, a concentric sun, and flower blossoms, the actual inked portions were raised compared to the areas that left the paper white. This creates unique and natural textures along with a sense of depth. For Memory in Crane, a print of vertically aligned paper cranes, the inked material was not fully attached to the plate. Instead, they were threaded onto strings and notched into the cardboard, allowing for two prints with opposite-direction facing patterns. I lovingly refer to this as a ‘movable type crane’, and would like to continue the interchangeability of printmaking with additional collagraphs in the future.

As noticeable in my collagraphs, cranes are a subject frequently represented in my academic work. Since folding my first senbanzuru (collection of one thousand paper cranes) during my first semester at college, both the red-crowned crane and the origami crane have appeared in my art. While they can be symbols of longevity or luck, I prefer comparing and contrasting their forms as an organic animal and a folded item, and the repetition of design inherent to a senbanzuru. These two forms can be seen in the gouache painting Cranes and Sun, as the two cranes interact with each other spatially against a red sun. This composition elements of both cranes and the sun is also influenced by hanafuda (flower cards) imagery, which is echoed in the previously mentioned Crane Collagraph.

The repetition element of senbanzuru is also the basis for my Crane enamel pins. As enamel pins are produced in batches from a mold, one can have them produced in multiple colours while sharing the same shape. A batch size also requires having a certain number of them (minimum order quantity, or MOQ), which informed the design of the half-sized cranes, allowing them to visibly stack on each other and on the full-sized cranes. The return to a flat space the three-dimensional object made from flat paper (origami) makes when viewed from the side as represented in these Crane enamel pins is also of interest.

I hope to explore more three-dimensional mediums. A concept I’ve had for some time is a scale sculpture of a tree with paper cranes hung as the blossoms, titled Cranes Like Wisteria. This phrase comes from one of my planned writings, and would be an accumulation of many ideas and art forms I enjoy exploring. Please look forward to this and anything else I conjure up in the future!