Rooted in portrait painting, my work engages with family, home, and gender after being raised in the American South. When creating From the Heart and Hands, which features my mother with one of her many quilts, I developed an additional fascination with fiber art. Through sewing, a skill passed down through generations of women, I access material connections to a collective female history and reflect on my adolescent rejection of femininity. In Mini Me, my girlhood and womanhood are bound together in the recreation of my childhood self, questioning the divide between them while also blurring the lines between painting and craft histories.