Graduating in May of 2025 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute, I have been traversing the connection between the human and animal world through surrealist fantasy paintings, costuming, and portraiture. I want to open a constructive conversation about the social hierarchy that we have created for ourselves, separating us as humans from them as animals, and inherently “animalistic” behaviors. I am adamant about the fact that we are made from animals, with the same atoms, components and chemicals. With this being said, I also bring in my perspective of being a Furry – a community of individuals that create and embody anthropomorphic animals often representing different parts of themselves – into the conversation about physical enactment of the human and animal together.

The intersection between these two entities is where my work manifests itself. My animal alter-ego’s that I have created to express myself take the form of digital drawings, paintings and sculptural costuming. In the fandom, it is what we refer to as a fursuit. But with my interest in the relationship between human and animal, I want to use the fursuit as a base for a broader perspectivation. The act of dressing as another species yet having the othering characteristics of humans, such as religion, technology, and self-referentiality, add to the complicated relationship between the two sides.

Inside the community, Furry brings in specific values of self-actualization through performance, forming out of the conversations surrounding gender identity, queer transformation, and unification of the in-between states through means of costuming, character design, community engagement, and the enacting of an alter-ego. My work outside of the Furry community continues the same sentiments of blurring the lines between naturalism, humanism, and animalism, exploring different kinds of human-animal hybrids, and studying these allegorical expressions throughout history as well. I plan on continuing my work in and out of the Furry community, and is beginning to combine the aspects of costuming, portraiture, fantasy, and painting as its own kind of hybrid animal.

 Surrounded by this interspecies play, I allegorize the dichotomy of our relationship with the earth and its creations, creating a   transmission of fantastical characters and elaborate costuming that is used to inform the greater performance of the alter-ego through different species. My work is not merely a reflection of these ideas, but an ongoing recital of it.