Working on a small and intimate scale wasn’t so much of a deliberate choice for me, rather a practicality when working in a tight space in Brooklyn. It did have its benefits, it’s immediate and i don’t do a lot of sketches so it allowed me to quickly flush out ideas and work through a range of narratives. 

As my work has developed, both technically and conceptually, and grown into more complex pieces, so has my desire to work on a larger scale as well as being able to step back and look at several pieces together. My work has for a long time been exploring subjects of family, mostly through my own. While stepping away from my family to explore through a different lens, that of my daughter’s father’s lineage who is from a different cultural background, it seemed to make sense to grow in scale as I am not as intimately connected to the figures in these narratives. The first painting I made at Aferro came so easy, as if I had been waiting to make it for a long time. Though not huge, it was much larger than my previous work, with close to life size figures. Stepping up even larger in scale, my next big piece did not come so easy and it is still in progress. What made the first one work for me but not the second? And how can I translate the qualities that I enjoy in my small intimate pieces to large scale work? Can I maintain a level of intimacy and dream? Or do I need develop more precision and clarity? These are the issues I am working through now while also thinking about the general themes of my work; family and gender roles within family, migration, and identity. Below are some pieces that I have made at Aferro.