In Beneath the Surface, multiple exposure self-portraits layered with medical imaging and natural elements – including tree limbs and the movement of water – metaphorically represent areas of disease and underlying symptoms that are not as obvious to an untrained eye, with a goal of raising awareness that disease processes are often hidden from view and that significant life- and activity-limiting disease can be invisible to others.

The trees reflect anatomy such as veins or thin bones, but also in their thinness and winter state without leaves, allude to the weakness and death of the superimposed, diseased structures. They enable the viewer to see that a mostly normal-appearing body may hide significant abnormalities. At a microscopic level, water patterns closely resemble cells and genetic abnormalities, and such movement of water creates unusual images of it much in the same way cellular and molecular genetic variations can create disease. This can be at a microscopic level too minute to see instead of being a phenotype that is obvious to all who observe it.

I view the overexposed image of self as reflective of medical imaging and feelings of wanting sometimes to be seen in more detailed ways so that I am better understood. When the human form is broken into pieces, the work begins to reflect the detachment that occurs during a genetic disease when the body is working against itself.

Malleable fabric with loose threads attached to rope that is wrapped around a tree mirror my inner feelings battling neuromuscular disease, while relating back to a simpler way of living to demonstrate the external effects of physical disease and the need for therapies from infancy to prosper — the cost of medical care and the financial impact it has on families. Such representation, too, speaks to the uncertainty and fragility of life, the search for structure, and as a result, the need to hang everything that troubles me on the proverbial clothesline, to air the laundry of my invisible disease, so that I can be seen.