The series We Hold Us Gently is a series of digital media works that exist in the space between performance and memory, where gesture becomes language and the body becomes both subject and site. Each piece begins as an attempt to locate myself within inherited structures of power: gender, lineage, labor, faith, nation. Through video, I re-stage and reimagine the daily rituals that shape and confine identity—acts of grooming, dressing, touching, withholding. In these gestures, I search for a vocabulary of tenderness that can coexist with critique.
The work moves through the domestic and the devotional, through the private made public. I am interested in how the body, particularly the queer, femme, or feminized body, holds contradiction: both vulnerability and resistance, both self-erasure and insistence on presence. The camera becomes a mirror and a witness, capturing moments where performance and sincerity blur.
We Hold Us Gently
Video, 06:59
Dimensions variable
2024
This work unfolds in three parts, each reflecting a phase in my pursuit of community and interconnection, grounded in an exploration of the inner self. For years, my art has been fueled by a combustible, unrelenting anger toward the patriarchy and the harm it perpetuates, but this method of working and processing has left me fragmented and isolated. In the impending consequences of the recent U.S. election, I find myself questioning whether this approach can continue. It no longer feels sustainable—nor does it feel like enough.
In the first phase of the work, my hands rest on a table, reaching outward. They meet another set of hands—my own, doubled within the frame. They reach for each other. As they touch and overlap, their form softens, their colors deepen. I ask to be held. I need reassurance to believe I am not alone. At first, I can only trust myself. Then, more hands appear, joining mine. “We are right here.”
My hands again rest on a surface to meet others as they stack stones and shells on my nails. The act of performing femininity, once isolating, becomes a shared ritual. In gathering—whether as groups, circles, or covens—even under the guise of patriarchal expectation, we subvert it. The plans fail. “We are holding you.”
My fingers comb my mother’s hair. My mother combs my hair with her fingers. In this gentle, intimate exchange, I am held, and I hold her in return. Together, in these moments of care, I find the foundation for something new. This is where I choose to root myself: in gentleness and connection, in the domestic and the shared. In this act, I honor the feminine and queer wisdom of the body and the lived experiences of mothers and elders, whose knowledge passes from hand to hand. In these small, profound gestures, we become, as Janine Antoni describes, “vehicles of interconnection to ourselves, to others, and to the world.”
All You Will Have Forgotten
Video, 02:24
Dimensions variable
2025
This work unfolds as a quiet excavation, an attempt to touch what has been obscured. My hands move through a field of absence, buttoning and unbuttoning garments that hang without bodies. Each gesture suggests a body once there or a story withheld. The translucent fabrics layer and slip across each other, revealing and concealing in turn, like memories surfacing through generations of silence.
The voice that accompanies the images is my own, reading my parents’ responses to a simple question: Were or are there any queer people in our family? Their words are tentative, uncertain—rumors, suspicions, half-remembered truths. What emerges is a portrait of erasure, of lives lived quietly, unnamed.
As a queer person, I inherit not lineage but absence. I have no elders to guide me, only the trace of what might have been. In this space, I imagine new forms of kinship. I hold the garments as I might hold their ghosts, performing small acts of care for those whose stories were never told. In the rhythm of fastening and unfastening, I search for a way to stay connected—to remember what was never passed down.