In both Collaged Ecologies and Precarious Arrangements, I re-imagine aspects of our relationships to the natural world, subverting inherent power dynamics by challenging the original context and intention of materials or elements lifted from common media sources. I particularly quote imagery from media sources such as culture and lifestyle magazines, which contain inherent codifications of gender norms and seductive representations of luxury and consumerism. I consider the material histories of goods depicted, and how we as a human culture have assigned value to materials we live with, wear, and use to craft our identities, as well as the ecological legacies of our relationships to these materials and their visual culture.

By recontextualizing found images, I disrupt their original intents and question aspects of the powerful dynamics they perpetuate. Blending aesthetic categories—synthetic and organic, flora and fauna, bodily and constructed forms—allows for an investigation of the boundary between the natural and the “unnatural.” This approach foregrounds an affirmation of queer hybridity, rejecting cultural hierarchies, and valuing different kinds of bodies.

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I look to contemporary tactics of queer abstraction (through formal strategies of queering) without making use of the traditional legibility of the human figure. Relationships are forged between the decorative and organic through collage hybridity. Resulting forms hover in a void, alternately seen as arrangements or creatures of an ambiguous scale and relationship to the viewer. The consideration of how such materials might be "queered" becomes infused within the process for each collage-based composition. This is engaged through aesthetic strategies of subversion, decoration, gender-bending, maximalism and hybridity.

Speculative fabulation as a queer ecological concept merges fictions and non-fictions, and practices of world-building to better consider multiple and non-human viewpoints. This shift from the human-centric perspective fosters inter-connectedness, encouraging us to envision and create better futures, full of "creatures of the imagination". I utilize speculative fabulation (through collage abstraction) as a means of engaging the queer ecological imagination. Abstraction in this mode offers new challenges to presumptions about the body, gender, and sexuality. New interpretations of materials beyond the literal depiction of a figure or body become a way of affirming and valuing all different kinds of bodies. And illegibility or ambiguity thusly becomes a powerful form of queer expression, difficult to homogenize, commercialize, or surveil.

I place imagery of marginalized or unrefined materials like scraps of fabric, trash, plant materials, fatty globs, flesh, hair, tentacles, bones, eggs, crystalline structures, and wood within equal territory to a Chanel purse, a pair of red Louboutin heels, or a Fabergé egg. I utilize flamboyant abundance and suggest layered identities through decoration and elaboration. I critique or re-signify cultural symbols through a kind of queer maximalism, or performative "drag". Collage is a process that exceptionally allows for such queering, taking fragments of visual culture to reinterpret and challenge dominant normative frameworks, producing queered associations, and encouraging expressiveness and inclusivity.​​​