My mjor project during All You Can Art 2023 was my Papercut Prom Dress - an assignment from Anartist Vinyard to make an outfit for our finissage ball. Very quickly, this project became much more than making a statement on the runway: it became a journey in self-therapy, an outlet to process my trauma from Childhood #1

During the process of making my dress - somewhere between the liberation of writing down every toxic comment my parents spewed on me and th moment of celebration walking down the catwalk - I cam to both love and hate this thing that I had brought into existence.

One part of me was sincerely impressed how I could make something completely driven by the fire, the urgency, in y soul. The other part of me felt a deep, piercing pain in that same soul - the pain of being confronted with events of a toxic childhood, accepting that they happened, and learning to co-exist with the physical-visual expression of this pain.

At one point in time, I wanted to burn the dress - forget about the ball, destroy it beyond recognition, and out all of ky trauma in a box.

Eventually, I learned to carry the pain of my past and wanted to turn it into something better. Become an alchemist and transmute my pain into expressions of love and passion. And so, this project was born.