my time in the military was pretty stressful.

There was a lot to process from that.

ceramics is extremely meditative and helps to really work out those feelings.

Yeah.

Ceramics is a medium that can be pretty harsh.

It teaches you to let go of things You unfortunately don't really know whether or not it's going to be successful until you open the kiln.

All of the work that you put into it kind of culminates in this one moment The process with wood firing.

It's heating up the pieces by the combustion of wood.

Even the different words you put in will have an a different, different effect on the color.

And what's really cool is that the wood ash that's released actually acts as like a melting agent for the glass that the glaze essentially.

it creates these really interesting effects.

So you can almost have a visual narrative of what's happening on the piece because of wood firing.

It's just it's kind of magical specifically with atmospheric firing, Wood firing is something that you generally can't do by yourself.

shifts can range anywhere between like 4 hours to 8 hours, depending on how long the firing is.

So Community in Clay is one of my favorite parts about ceramics.

art's a form of communication.

innately you're going to have your background story into it just based off the way you pull a piece or the way you work with the clay with your hands.

my mother was born in Bangkok, Thailand, But I also lived in the U.S. and I'm also queer and a lot of identity plays into like my everyday experience.

So when I'm communicating through art, it generally has a way of coming out in certain effect.

I can't really hide who I am now I'm exploring the idea of double walls in vessels and how you have walls as a person and what that means to let down your walls or keep them up or different different ideas of how to play with that.

what I did in the military.

Really.

Shaped who I am now I had experiences, especially like in the Middle East.

That changed my perception of.

war or violence and gives me kind of a dual perspective.

Like I've seen what it can do.

And I also see the after effects that it has on people on both sides.

So let's face it, like mental health is not something that we openly talk about.

interactions I had in the military have like brought me extreme shame and like depression and all of those things.

but I think it's important to talk about it and it's important to communicate it, it's kind of pushed me towards art and hopefully my art can kind of be an outlet for those, those intersectional conversations between like the military and queer individual or also like the conservative nature of serving in the military, but the liberal nature of like living in the US where we have these freedoms.

So it's one way for me to kind of walk that line and feel out all this internal stuff.

to artists who are going into any field, there is a community for you in the arts.

Like, definitely you have a voice in the arts.

There's people here who will be your mentors.

There's people here who will help you learn whatever you want to learn.

It may be tough to find them, but there is a community who supports your identity and you should pursue whatever you want to pursue in, you know, bring the most of yourself to whatever you do.