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 lets me offer care to these worlds in ways I was denied in my own reproductive health experiences. I paint bodily fluids as liquid architecture 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 back into the game engine. I stage the game with projectors and three enlarged sculptures of an IUD, a tampon, and a birth control pill packet, enlarging 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 devices redirect the rules governing the space: where blood can travel, where liquids are absorbed, 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 has no enemies, wins, or waypoints, yet the player still encounters violence in the way physical and digital bodies are targeted by supposedly neutral code that carries the coder’s ideology and bias. Just as ultrasounds and anti-abortion posters push the womb into the background as a blank backdrop, many games relegate feminized bodies to decorative scenery, to be harvested or exploited. Here I invert the controls so the player’s agency stutters; the point is to inhabit rather than to conquer.
In the opening game 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 rehearse autonomy under regulation. Through paint I keep my body present. Through code I keep mechanics visible. The worlds grow, but never without the one who creates them.
