Tell us about your work. Why cyanotype?

AS: My work is grounded in stillness, ritual, and return. I’m interested in what it means to be seen, to disappear, and to re-emerge on my own terms. Cyanotype gives me a way to work slowly and attentively—it’s tactile, responsive, and elemental. It’s a photographic process that doesn’t rely on a lens, and that feels important to me. The light doesn’t capture—it reveals.

I first turned to cyanotype because I needed to find a way to add text to cloth for a sculpture class. I was making a deconstructed molotov cocktail—a piece that would serve as both artwork and altar, holding space for reflection in response to the constant violence and suppression that keeps us from rising up. Access to other image-transfer and printmaking methods was gatekept, so I turned to what I could reach. Cyanotype was available, direct, and honest.

That initial gesture became a practice. I committed to cyanotype completely—experimenting daily, trusting my hands, breaking the rules almost immediately. I knew I’d get bored if I didn’t, and I didn’t want to lose something I loved. That resistance to convention became part of the process. I needed the work to remain alive, responsive, open.
It wasn’t until more than a year in that I found Cyanomicon by Mike Ware. Reading it felt like catching up to myself. His storytelling affirmed what I had already intuited—that process holds lineage, and that invention doesn’t need permission. His writing made me feel like I belonged to the medium in my own way.
Sometimes I work with ruby red grapefruit juice—its acidity subtly shifts the tone of the blue in ways most people wouldn’t name, but can still feel. That quiet transformation is part of the language I’m building—personal, veiled, and always in motion.

How did you learn about the medium?

AS: The answer is simple: I first learned cyanotype in a photo class during undergrad and began using it experimentally in a printmaking and bookbinding course. Around the same time, I worked—though never formally titled—as a collections photographer at a major museum, a role I held for nearly a decade.

While that environment was often marked by exclusion, there were rare moments of recognition—especially around cyanotype. I was lucky to be in a space where its uniqueness was seen, not dismissed. The cyanotypes that came through the studio weren’t always pristine or expected, but they carried presence. Someone noticed that. And that noticing stayed with me.

It shaped how I understood the medium—not as lesser or secondary, but as something quietly expansive. I don’t know that I understood it fully then, but I felt it. And I’ve been following that feeling ever since.

What’s the inspiration behind Apparitions and Sightings?

AS: Apparitions & Sightings began during a time when my mental health was becoming increasingly visible—something I was open about, but still privately trying to make sense of. That visibility didn’t always feel like care. In fact, it often deepened a sense of alienation—like being known without being understood.

I created this work as a way to speak around those experiences, to name displacement and fragmentation without having to explain them. The cyanotypes are layered and obscure, like memory or masking. They hold presence and absence at once. There’s also a zine that accompanies the series—a quieter space where language, repetition, and symbolism could unfold alongside the imagery.

I don’t know that the work was able to speak fully on its own—at least not without this context. But I’m grateful to finally have these words, to say what I couldn’t say then. The work was the beginning of the sentence. This is me finishing it—and that finishing feels like an opening act for the stories of self-evolution still to come. The next chapters will be more whole, more honest, and more rooted in who I’ve become since learning how to listen.

Conceptually, how would you describe your work? And why did you choose to work with canvas more recently?

AS: At its core, my work is about stillness, return, and transformation. I think of it as a practice of visual unmasking—finding ways to express the parts of myself that exist between visibility and disappearance. I’m drawn to process-heavy, tactile methods like cyanotype because they let me work with time, with light, with memory. There’s a devotional quality to it—it’s slow, repetitive, and quiet in a way that feels true to how I move through the world.
I began working with canvas more recently as a way to shift the role of the material from surface to participant. I don’t stretch it—it’s important that the canvas isn’t forced into rigidity. Stretching feels too restrictive, too tied to conventions I’m not interested in upholding. Letting the canvas hang, drape, or breathe allows it to carry the weight of the process without being fixed in place. It’s a gesture of respect—honoring the material not just for what it shows, but for how it holds.

There’s also a practical side to it. Canvas allows me to scale the work—to make it larger, more physical, more immersive. It lets me enter into deeper conversation with abstraction—not as something rooted in painting, but in Indigenous visual traditions that speak through symbol, repetition, rhythm, and land. The canvas becomes a vessel for those echoes, shaped by process rather than imposed form.

Tell us about your piece Save Boca Chica.

AS: Save Boca Chica is a protest cyanotype—clear, direct, and entirely handmade. It was created in response to Space X’s expansion into South Texas, where corporate ambition continues to displace communities and disrupt sacred land under the illusion of progress.
At the time, I was deep in grad school and feeling the kind of disconnection that comes with diaspora. I had spent so long feeling far from the Valley—both physically and emotionally—and was just beginning to fall in love with her again. I wanted to be there. I needed to be there. To show up. To fight for her.

What grounded me was finding people already doing that work—organizers, artists, and community members resisting and caring for the land in ways that felt true. Seeing that online reminded me that she was not alone. That she was being held. And that even from a distance, I still belonged to her.

Like all of my cyanotypes, this piece wasn’t made using the sun. I hand-exposed the entire work with UV flashlights, a process I developed myself. I filled markers with UV-blocking ink and wrote directly onto masking tape, creating a stencil that preserved each letter through the absence of light. Every mark was mine—made intentionally, with care and resistance.

Save Boca Chica isn’t just a message—it’s a ritual. A rasquache act of love, refusal, and return. A way of saying: I see you. I haven’t forgotten. And we’re still here.

What does the future hold for you?

AS: I hope it holds more space—space to listen, to build, to trust what’s already guiding me. I don’t have a five-year plan, but I’m moving with clarity. Lately, everything in my life and practice feels like it’s pointing toward Tulsa.

I haven’t known about the Tulsa Artist Fellowship for very long, but the way it’s entered my life—through people I trust, through the timing of new work, through the way my projects are materializing—has felt undeniable. It’s not about chasing opportunity, it’s about recognizing alignment. The work I’m making now is asking for community, for land, for language, for continuity. Tulsa feels like the place where those things might converge.
Whatever the future holds, I want to keep creating work that respects the struggle, honors the pain, but gently lessens the burden. I want to make spaces—visual, physical, and emotional—where people can set things down. Where tenderness is not a compromise, but a power. And where the unseen parts of us can finally breathe.