Stories are powerful, especially the message they communicate to us. As a child, I grew up reading fairytales, myths, and comic books. Looking back, these stories made me think about how women are represented and viewed in our culture today and the often-unrealistic physical expectations we are held to. From the traditional fairytales we learn as children to the latest big budget blockbuster, we typically see women brutally punished for being outcasts, monsters, and villains. We learn that beauty is morally good, ugliness is a sign of wickedness, and the only form of acceptable sexual empowerment is that which does not challenge male privileges or power. With my body of work, I call into question these problematic perspectives by taking these troubling, monstrous stories about historical and mythological women and recontextualizing them with contemporary elements and 

from alternative viewpoints. I want her, the monster and the outcast, to become the hero of their own story.  In a broader sense my work sits at the confluence of consumer culture, folktales, and feminist theory. Printmaking is my primary medium because of its versatility and long history of use in story telling and narrative-based work. Because you make multiple editions of the same image, printmaking is unique in its ability to mass produce works and spread ideas or messages across a wide audience, often even further than the artist would have thought possible. As a medium, printmaking can also be scaled up or down depending on the techniques and methods utilized and there is also a very close connection with comics and the ability to tell a story.