My work has always represented the growth I have had as a person. My earlier acrylic abstract works were reflections of the simplicity of my life, the naivety and the ease in which I thought that my life journey would take. My current works reflect the many layers that have made me who I am, the joys and the sadness, the falls and the rising. To create these collage and mixed media pieces, I add light layers of paint underneath and on top of different textures of papers, lace, buttons and twine among other textured materials to tell and retell the stories of my own life and of those whose stories I intuit or have heard. I believe that the layers in my current work represent the layers that make up who I have become in the years since I started creating art and even who I was before. Memories from my past, particularly memories with my family, consistently show themselves in my pieces, especially the women in my family. Through examining my upbringing and creating, I have learned that we are not only the person that we are the day that we are born and after; we are parts of those who came before us, generations of different emotions and trauma, of strength and resilience. This is why I work with layering because it reflects life; the removing of things and the adding onto.