I’ve had a love of books and paper for as long as I can remember. My grandparents ran a scrap paper business in Chicago, and I spent hours drawing on the warehouse floor, surrounded by paper and books on their way to being discarded. One client was World Book Publications, whose outdated encyclopedias arrived with every page slashed so they couldn’t be resold. My grandmother couldn’t bear to see books destroyed, so she would tape the pages back together and give them to my cousins and me. I think that may be where my fascination with damaged, altered, and rescued things began.

Recently, I learned that my great-grandfather may have been a bookbinder for a rabbi in Vilna, Lithuania. I don’t know much about him, but the discovery has stayed with me. It’s deeply moving knowing that, generations before me, someone in my family may have spent his days working with books and paper.

I began my career as a graphic designer, where I learned to communicate as economically as possible. Later, when my mother lost her ability to speak because of a brain tumor, I became interested in what happens when language fails, and what remains when words disappear. This eventually led me to pursue a Master of Fine Art degree, and I began working with text, books, printmaking, photography, and paper.

My work explores what happens when information is removed, rearranged, or obscured. After a trip to Spain, I began cutting geometric patterns inspired by Moorish architecture into newspaper front pages. The cutting is destructive, but what remains becomes more visible. The fragile patterns also recall mashrabiyas - lattice screens that protect and conceal while allowing light and air to pass through.

I keep returning to loss and preservation: what disappears, what survives, and what we choose to hold onto. I’m interested in making space for what is missing as much as for what is there, and to shine some light through fixed ideas and assumptions.