My work lives where paint and code meet. I model digital 3D interiors that behave like ultrasounds, digitized membranes that smooth the body flat. Their aesthetics echo anti-abortion posters where fetuses float in empty voids that crop cords and dissolve the carrying body into a backdrop. That blankness becomes the ground for my womb world. I counter it by populating these interiors with elements from the fraught history of reproductive health: IUDs as characters, Lysol as deadly contraceptive, tampons as icons, menstrual blood swelling into oceans, orgasm erupting like a waterpark. These renders then become paintings.
Unlike a digital render that appears instantly, painting requires time and intimacy. It enables me to care for these worlds in ways I was denied in my own reproductive health experiences. I paint bodily fluids as liquid infrastructure in uterine pinks and arterial reds, mixing pigments to echo watery, thick, curdled, or milky textures. The canvas absorbs these liquids like cloth pads, revealing the carrying body through brushmarks that register labor and care.
In my recent project, Womb World, I scan hand-painted assets into the game engine. I stage the game with projectors and three enlarged sculptures of an IUD, tampon, and a birth control pill packet, magnifying the reproductive technologies we insert, swallow, or wear into womb landmarks. The game’s projected light curls around the sculptures, pooling in cavities, so the reproductive technology redirects the rules governing the space: where blood can travel, where liquids are absorbed, and when a passage opens or seals. The same hardware that edits cycles inside the body now edits the game’s cycles, and the player must navigate that altered womb.
The game contains no enemies, wins, or waypoints, yet the player still encounters violence because violence often arrives through systems that falsely claim neutrality. Just as ultrasounds and anti-abortion posters push the womb into the background as a blank backdrop, many games relegate feminized and marginalized bodies to decorative scenery, to be harvested or exploited. Sandbox games promise freedom, choice, and endless possibility, but that freedom is always conditional. It is written into existence by defaults, by what the system will and will not allow, and by the developer’s assumptions about whose body and whose behavior counts as normal.
I build that scrutiny into the mechanics of my game. I invert the game’s controls so the player’s agency stutters; the point is to inhabit rather than to conquer. The game may look like a simulation of freedom, but it behaves like the technologies it stages: it offers choices inside a carefully designed system outside the player’s control. In the opening world, you are tethered to a giant hand in a bloodied bathroom as it drops a tampon into a toilet that refuses to flush. You suction through a vaginal opening into a biome where womb figures watch a candle drip white wax into a pond while another figure milks a condom of the same substance. Approaching the flame transforms you into a human-faced sperm. You swim toward two ovarian figures cradling a cave that contains a copper IUD. Contact kills you. Copper is poison to your kind. Navigation becomes a negotiation with a living system that tugs, redirects, and rebuffs.
Drawing from Donna Haraway’s speculative fabulation, I use fiction and worldbuilding to simulate autonomy under regulation. Through paint, I keep my body present. Through code, I keep the constraints visible. The worlds grow, but never without the one who creates them.
