I focus on storytelling and expressing my identity through my pieces. I grew up performing, doing community theater, school plays and musicals, and charity events. I loved the storytelling aspect of theater and performing arts. My passion lies in taking a story and creating an exciting and engaging way to tell it. I seek to explore the many facets of identity by peeling back the layers of my own story. 

In the winter of my sophomore year, I enrolled in Ceramics 100 simply to fulfill my graduation requirement. However, after I made my first cylinder, I realized art was what I needed to be doing. As an Ethiopian American, making art has allowed me to explore my heritage in a new way, learning traditional designs and ceramic forms. Ceramic tableware exists in every culture and every person’s life in some way. By creating ceramic tableware with American and Ethiopian elements, I can express my identity in a medium everyone understands and knows. Ceramic tableware serves as an important usable art in Ethiopian culture. Every piece has a story, from the building and firing to the design and decoration. Using ceramics to express my heritage and culture helped me realize that art could become a new medium for sharing about myself that I didn’t have before, and this shaped how I approached creating. I have since pushed myself in new ways to communicate other facets of my identity. I began exploring collaging and painting in my senior year of high school. I started working on my biggest piece, a 4x3’ wooden board that blends paint, pencil, and collage. In this piece, I branched out from exploring my cultural identity to creating a thought-provoking work that is semi-autobiographical. The piece centers around voluntary blindness, drawing attention to the problems we ignore and choose not to see. This piece has pushed me out of my comfort zone into an area of expressing who I am and acknowledging how blind we are to so many parts of humanity. Born out of my frustration with the negative stereotypes of some of my identifiers, creating this piece allowed me to communicate what I struggle to say. 

Being vulnerable in my work has allowed me to express myself openly and encourage discourse around identity in general. In my future work, I’d like to take more from around me and explore the lives of others, learning about new cultures and continuing dialogue about how we choose to look at each other. Who are we seeing? Who are we ignoring? Those are the questions I seek to investigate in my future work.