Into the Womb began after repeated encounters with anti-abortion protesters on campus. Their posters showed fetuses floating in empty space—images that claim to reveal a hidden interior, but in reality erase the body that carries it. Ultrasound, the dominant way we picture the fetus, does something similar. Cropped cords, blank voids, and monochrome scans isolate the fetus while making the pregnant body disappear. What should be an intimate ecology is reduced to a political object.
This paradox—making the fetus hyper-visible while erasing the person—led me to imagine wombs of my own. I use Blender to construct strange digital interiors that I later translate into paintings. These are not medical illustrations but counter-worlds: uncanny, surreal environments filled with fluids, impossible architectures, and distorted figures. They are strange and funny, grotesque and sacred, where what has been stigmatized returns as generative material.
Foreign objects and fluids take on symbolic weight. Wire hangers echo the trauma of unsafe abortions, Lysol recalls its history as a deadly contraceptive, tampons recur as protagonists, and bread and wine reappear in Yeast Infection, where illness becomes a twisted liturgy. Menstrual blood becomes oceans and bathtubs, semen cools into wax, and an orgasm erupts as a waterpark. These materials refuse shame and instead animate new worlds.
For me, worldbuilding the womb is political. The womb has been scripted by courts, politicians, and religious institutions as a vessel without agency. By imagining it as a world, I give it aliveness and autonomy—the ability to change, to resist, to speak back. These wombs are messy, glitchy, and alive. They overflow their assigned meanings and reclaim the right to astonish on their own terms.
