Cuttings from the Walled Garden is a series of colored pencil drawings that explores personal mythology. My work is informed by animal guides, oracles, miracles, and the symbolic language of folklore and fairy tales. I think of my drawings as illustrations to a lost text—a fragmented memoir of captivity within a walled garden.
I filter lived experience through the logic of folk tales, imagining my life as a story passed down orally and altered with each retelling. Princesses appear and disappear, leaving behind their dresses and lingerie like husks. Clothing becomes both armor and cage—an instrument of conformity and control, but also a means of resistance, self-definition, and survival.
The hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, functions as both refuge and prison, a feminized space shaped by ideals of purity, containment, and longing. Within this landscape, birds, animals, and plants act as witnesses, messengers, perpetrators, and victims, carrying emotional weight that exceeds language. Through drawing, I rewrite the fairy tale, allowing the walled garden to shift from a site of confinement into one of self-knowledge, ambiguity, and power.
I filter lived experience through the logic of folk tales, imagining my life as a story passed down orally and altered with each retelling. Princesses appear and disappear, leaving behind their dresses and lingerie like husks. Clothing becomes both armor and cage—an instrument of conformity and control, but also a means of resistance, self-definition, and survival.
The hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, functions as both refuge and prison, a feminized space shaped by ideals of purity, containment, and longing. Within this landscape, birds, animals, and plants act as witnesses, messengers, perpetrators, and victims, carrying emotional weight that exceeds language. Through drawing, I rewrite the fairy tale, allowing the walled garden to shift from a site of confinement into one of self-knowledge, ambiguity, and power.