About The Piece: “This is a piece that I collaged to the front of an old personal journal before its pages were completely filled. My journal is a space where I feel free to map the jumbled architecture of my mind, yet somehow it resists the incoherence that can be found in my Notes app or book marginalia. I’ve lived my whole life with ADHD—although only diagnosed relatively recently—and thus I grew up told from all angles that my attention was oriented toward incorrect directions. I wanted this piece to capture the liberation and necessity of having a place to be me, a place where I am allowed to meander and follow my pen—my attention—wherever it leads. Like so much of my art, it was never intended to be a piece I was proud enough to share; I was simply sifting through magazines, letting myself clip where my hand was drawn toward. I clipped from a dusty old book of poetry a stanza from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” because it was one of the first poems to convince me that poetry held something invaluable, something inaccessible by other means. I chose that stanza because it spoke to what reading and writing means to me: a vector to share myself with the world and to share the world with me, a way of effectively communicating, a chance at trying to make meaning. I am very excited to hear what other people read when they see this piece; I like being understood through my art, but to some extent I even more like seeing how people interface with my work, seeing their interpretations and how they interact with it. I’m a chemist and I’m a collage artist; to me, both chemistry as a discipline and collage as an art form deal very intimately with the interactions between things—that’s where the interesting stuff lives. People often get nervous when they share what they see in my work as if they are afraid of being “wrong,” but I myself find new interpretations of my own work all the time; when I made this, I was having trouble understanding exactly how comfortable (or uncomfortable) I was with my assigned gender. Looking now, I see little hints and bursts of that tension sewn throughout the collage, a tension I never meant to manifest there. I’m equally captivated by my own interpretations as I am with the interpretations of others, and I hope I share this enthusiasm with the viewer.”

About The Author: “I’m a Pacific Northwest transplant who grew up just outside Seattle before moving north to a coastal college town on the land of the Coast Salish people called Bellingham, WA to earn my Bachelor’s of Science in Chemistry at Western Washington University. This August, I moved to Bloomington-Normal where I’m currently pursuing my Master’s in Chemistry with Illinois State researching the nature of di-halogen intermolecular interactions with Dr. Bhaskar Chilukuri. People are often surprised when they learn I’m a scientist after seeing my art/writing or when they see my art/writing after meeting me as a scientist. I never really understood why. In my eyes, there is no substantial difference between the practices—I see them mostly as two different ways of seeing the same thing. I make art and write for the same reasons I do scientific research and sit through chemistry lectures: I want to understand the world, I want to share my ideas with people, and I want people to share their ideas with me. Both vantages are equally important, in my opinion, and my dedication to