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My Story
My work begins in the body—shaped by pain, memory, and what persists in remaining hidden. In my thirties, I was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis, a systemic autoimmune disease that reshaped how I moved, how I created art, and how I related to time. At first, I resisted, pushing through pain and adapting materials, but illness gradually demanded something different from me: not surrender, but a turn inward. What once seemed like interruption became a form of initiation, slowing me down into deeper ways of seeing.
That descent ultimately led me into psychotherapy, where I now work with clients navigating rupture, grief, and transformation. For me, art and therapy are not separate paths but the same impulse—to witness what has been exiled and bring it into form. Whether through drawings, writing, or in the clinical space, I aim not to transcend difficulty but to inhabit it, staying with complexity, fragility, longing, and ancestral memory.
My work has been supported by two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Medana Art Festival in Slovenia. My drawings and paintings have been published in American Artist, Manifest’s International Drawing Annual 13, Create! Magazine, and featured in numerous exhibitions and publications across the United States and abroad.
Artist Statement
The Mind: Depth Psychology and the Art of Witnessing
My work as a therapist is guided more by presence than by protocols, stemming from the belief that what remains unresolved within us does not disappear but waits. It reemerges in the body, in images, in dreams. I listen for what surfaces.
In the clinical space, as in the studio, I focus on fragments: gestures, patterns, repeated phrases without understanding why. The psyche rarely communicates in straight lines. It comes in flashes, resistances, and metaphors. Carl Jung wrote that symbols are not signs for something already understood, but containers of living mystery. I hold onto that idea closely.
For me, therapy is not about fixing things but about acknowledgment. It’s a space where what has been denied might gradually come to light through connection. Whether I am sitting with a client or standing at a drawing board, I keep returning to the act of witnessing: to what needs to be seen but stays hidden; to what remains alive, even in fractured places.
The Body: Descent, Transformation, and Inner Fire
The body: vulnerable, weathered, sensual, and marked by time, is at the heart of my work. Not merely as an object to be depicted, but as a place where memory resides, where lineage leaves its mark, and where meaning emerges before it can be labeled.
Living with Ankylosing Spondylitis has placed me in a long, uneven dialogue with pain. What initially was an unwelcome disruption gradually became a symbolic descent—a slow-burning fire that eroded old ambitions and revealed something stranger, more inward. My illness did not grant me wisdom, but it shifted my focus. It taught me how to wait, how to notice, how to draw from a deeper, older well.
I no longer see the wound as something to overcome. It is something to carry—consciously, symbolically, even reverently. My work follows the tradition of the Wounded Healer not as an ideal, but as a practice: a daily return to what hurts and the possibility that within the hurt, there is a form of knowing unavailable elsewhere.
The Word: Writing as Symbolic Inquiry
My writing emerged slowly, after illness and a lifetime of creating images. It started as notes on the edges of sketchbooks, then expanded into letters, essays, and small invocations. Writing became a way to make sense when form was not enough, a means of carrying what could no longer be painted.
I am drawn to writing that spirals toward resonance rather than resolution. My essays explore illness, memory, grief, and transformation. They are not arguments; they are forms of listening. Much of this work is shaped by my background in trauma-focused psychotherapy and Jungian depth psychology, which sees the psyche as an encoded, multilayered text rather than a problem to solve.
My fiction arises from the same terrain.
In Her Blood the River Flows is a novel about inheritance, art, and the uncanny edges of memory.
Beauty & Terror Inhabits Breath is a cycle of interconnected stories shaped by the Novi Sad Razzia, the 1942 massacre along the frozen Danube. The pieces are written in fragments that move between horror, witness, and remembrance, each one carrying a trace of what history could not hold.
Another speculative work is unfolding as well, still taking shape, still finding its own shadow and structure.
These works, along with the larger Daimon Archive project, explore how history imprints itself on the body and how silence persists across generations. These writings are neither memoir nor theory. They exist somewhere in between: transmissions from the body, the dream, and the deep self. I do not write to explain. I write to trace, to witness, and to follow whatever insists on returning.
→ Read the Essays
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