A Study in Identity and Home

My work begins with my own lived experience — as a woman, a single mother, and an expatriate. Each role has asked me to give something of myself, to shrink, to perform, to adapt. Those layers of displacement and expectation live in my art, where I explore how identity can be shaped, consumed, and sometimes erased by what the world demands of us.

I am a self-taught artist who moved from sculpture to acrylic and now to oil, not out of loyalty to medium, but of necessity. Each shift has been about finding the right language for what I need to say. In my current series, Not for your consumption, I turn to female identity — across ages and archetypes — and the weight of being pleasing, sweet, subservient, or useful. A bride as commodity, a mother as vessel, a girl as temptation: these images ask what it costs to always be for someone else.

My earlier practice in acrylics is equally important to me, rooted in themes of home, belonging, and the search for place. As someone who has crossed borders, built a life far from where I began, and raised children between cultures, I am always circling questions of what it means to belong — to a family, to a home, to a body, to a world that does not always accept you.

I make art to capture and translate moments of vulnerability, truth, strength, and resilience. Each piece is a way of claiming space, refusing silence, and asking viewers to confront not only how they see women, but how women are asked to see themselves.

— kAEDY