Descent into Madness

I grew up, like most people, knowing Alice in Wonderland as a story about curiosity and magic. The longer I sat with it, the more it felt like something else. A space that looks like wonder from the outside, but feels fractured and unsafe from within. That tension is where this work lives.

Descent of madness is a mixed media, body of work built from photography, sculpture, and painting. It reimagined Wonderland not as an escape, but as a map of the interior landscape, trauma survivors navigate. Beautiful on the surface, threatening underneath. I was drawn to Louis Carroll’s deeply troubling biography and to American McGee’s video game adaptation, which explicitly reframes Alice’s stories through the lens of childhood abuse and psychological survival. These sources gave me both permission and a framework to ask: what does Wonderland look like from inside a fractured mind?

The central figure in the work is deliberately ageless. I didn’t want viewers to have an easy out, a way to file this away as someone else’s story. Trauma collapses time. Survivors often describe feeling frozen at the age domething happened to them while also feeling worn beyond their years. The ambiguity is intentional. It’s an invitation to stay present with discomfort rather than look away.

Working across mediums felt necessary for the subject. Photography captures vulnerability in real, physical space. Sculptures make the psychological literal and intangible. Painting reaches into the distorted and dream like. Together, they try to do what no single medium can do on its own: holding complexity of a mind, trying to make sense of what it has survived.

My hope is that this work offer survivors is a mirror, and offers everyone else a window into experiences that are too often made invisible, carried silently, or dressed up and prettier stories than they deserve. 

Year: 2025 - 2026