Works

Broken In, 2025

Mixed Media

This work explores the concept of ephemerality by exposing how both women’s and horses’ bodies are socially and economically constructed as temporary sites of value. Celebrated for their youth, beauty, strength, or reproductive potential, and then discarded once they fall outside those ideals. Through this parallel, the piece reveals the fleeting nature of worth as defined by external systems; patriarchal, capitalist, and social aesthetic that commodify and consume the living. Visually this piece invites the viewer to confront the violence of impermanence, not the natural or poetic kind, but one produced and enforced by societal standards. It raises questions of mortality, beauty, and power: how the body becomes both a vessel of desire and a target of disposability.

“We accept the risk that comes with it…but that’s part of it. Where you have livestock, you have dead stock.”

– John Wheeler, prominent trainer, after three horses were killed in a single day at a New Zealand

racecourse (New Zealand Herald, 6/8/16)

“It’s hard to watch these poor animals running for their lives for people who could really care less if they live.”

– Dr. Margaret Ohlinger, track vet, Finger Lakes (New York Times, 3/24/12)

“When you go to women, don’t forget the whip.”

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883) a line often analyzed as emblematic of his misogynistic tone.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

“Often, to get the horse to stand still, the handler does something that the horse perceives as worse than the scary thing , chains on the nose, whips, being made to move in a tight circle until exhausted. … The

horse learns that nothing that they do matters, and they give up.” - Terry Golson