In 2016 while attending a month long artist intensive workshop I was asked to address what mattered most to me. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse I had worked through the trauma of this experience in conventional therapy but had yet to address it in my work. This safe environment of the workshop was the perfect setting to express the myriad of emotions I carried inside. What emerged was Object Of My Affection, expressing my lack of agency in the abusive situation with a trusted high school teacher. Driver’s Seat depicts the closet at school where the abuse took place. The subsequent work followed, flowing from my heart and hands.

The series, Objects of My Desire, are based on self photographed images of my contorted body. Expressing the emotions held within from the experience helped me make peace with a life long trauma.

In 2018 a MN State Art Board, Artist Initiative grant funded the work and community enrichment for my solo exhibition Irreproachable, at Hopkins Center for the Arts. The embroidered work What Went Wrong? based on an article on child sexual abuse on the internet came later. Published in the NY Times, by Michael H. Keller and Gabriel J.X. Dance, the four panels took over a year to complete and depict data collected from the internet for over two decades.

In the article they wrote “Twenty years ago online images of child sexual abuse was a problem; ten years ago an epidemic. Now this crisis is at a breaking point. In 1998 there were 3,000 reports of child sexual abuse imagery. Just over a decade later yearly reports soared to 100,000. In 2014 the number surpassed 1 million for the first time. In 2018 there were 18.4 million, more than one-third the total ever reported.Those reports included over 45 million images and videos flagged as child sexual abuse.” Just two years later, in 2020 new data shows that number has jumped to 50 million reports and continues to grow exponentially during the pandemic. 

Each French knot = 1,000 reports of sexual abuse on the internet. 

Panel I: 1998 - 3,000 reports; Panel II: 2009 - 100,000 reports; Panel III: 2014 - 1,000,000 reports; Panel IV: 2018 - 18,700,000 reports. Not depicted is the recent data from 2020, where over 50 million acts of abuse were reported.