My journey into art is fundamentally a quest to alleviate a persistent anxiety, an unease rooted in a childhood that shaped and, perhaps, distorted my early processes of meaning-making. For a long time, my artistic practice, whether creation or appropriation, was intuitive; I resisted assigning explicit thought, memory, or feeling to the resulting images. However, by committing to a more rigorous, research-based approach to my work, I began a profound self-examination, and in that process, the images began to reveal memories.

This shift in perception was accelerated by a recurring motif in my past work: the grid. Previously used without explicit rationale, the sudden awareness of memory within my images prompted me to search for "grids in psychology." This led me serendipitously to George Kelly's Personal Construct Psychology (PCP). The connection became all the more significant when I discovered that George Kelly directed the clinical psychology program at The Ohio State University and developed PCP here in 1955.

At the core of Kelly’s theory is the image of individuals as “incipient scientists,” constantly constructing, testing, revising, and expanding personal theories of the self and the world to anticipate life’s recurring themes. This resonated deeply with my artistic process. Specifically, Kelly's Repertory Grid technique—where people develop "constructs" or rules, often based on past experience, to interpret events and people—mirrors the interpretive framework I am now applying to my own visual language.

My current work seeks to formally engage with PCP, using my art as a form of personal science. According to the theory, psychological difficulties arise when one's constructions fail to provide a meaningful framework for anticipating events. By consciously examining and formalizing the "grids" and structures in my art, I am not only continuing my exploration of past memories but also developing a novel means of conceptualizing my own history and psychological landscape.

Applying to the Graduate School of Fine Arts at The Ohio State University is not merely a geographic choice; it is a recognition of the intellectual and historical context that has already begun to shape my practice. My goal is to utilize the rigorous academic environment here to further integrate the theoretical framework of Kelly’s work, which has its roots on this campus, into a disciplined and experimental studio practice. I believe the interdisciplinary spirit of the OSU Fine Arts program is the ideal environment in which to evolve my artistic inquiry from one driven by unconscious anxiety to one informed by conscious, research-based construction.