The Work That Doesn’t Count
I recently read an article on emotional labor in leadership. This article, “Heavier Lies Her Crown: Gendered Patterns of Leader Emotional Labor and Their Downstream Effects,” brought to mind a particular memory. Years ago, as an assistant manager at a large grocery retailer, I sat in my boss’s office discussing a situation. During our conversation,…
The Gap
The body remembers more than it can perform. When I return to the water, the first thing that comes back is the structure: the rhythm of the swimmers’ strokes, the movement of bodies through the lane. I know where to stand, how to push off the wall into streamline. The sequence if familiar before the…
When Language Falls Away
There is a difference between thinking and what happens in the body when language falls away. I first encountered this difference as a child, when I nearly drowned while swimming in a lake. The experience was not dramatic. It was physiological. The body reorganizes around breath. Speech becomes unavailable. Everything narrows to orientation and survival,…
Care, Labor, and the Work of Holding Things Together
My work always starts with the personal. I make paintings that explore memory, identity, and inheritance: what we carry, what we hide, and what we pass on. Much of this comes from family life, especially the complicated relationships among women across generations. I revisit these relationships not to solve them, but to understand how they keep shaping me. Lately, I’ve been thinking about my work through the lens of reproductive labor. It’s a term from feminist theory that refers to all the work necessary to sustain life and relationships—caregiving, feeding people, managing emotions, and maintaining connection. It’s the kind of…