“Robin writes about people reaching the absolute rock bottom of their life and building their way up from there.”  This quote is from an anonymous critic of my work who was able to wring a cohesive narrative out of my approach to art. Growing up, I was compelled by art and storytelling, whether it was in television or comics or in a painting on the wall at the museum. So much of the media landscape, even then at the turn of the century, was burdened with censorship and corporate interests working against the artist, sanding down the edges of what was personal and visceral to make it universal and marketable. Before I had words to describe this phenomenon, I knew I wanted to do the opposite. 

As I grew as an artist, I realized so much grief, and trauma never seemed to make it into museums, into books, or onto television. This journey led me down a lot of different roads, some physical and some allegorical. Three years ago, I started painting on mirrors, as a way to encourage the viewer to see themselves in my art. Being transgender I felt many people viewed my works as ‘trans art’ rather than just ‘art’ and I wanted to challenge them to not create this imaginary barrier between themselves and the story within my art. I wanted them to understand their place in what I was talking about. Throughout the years, I’ve used my mirror works to highlight parts of society many don’t want to shine light on or see; I wanted to confront the viewer with uncomfortable truths they had internalized as normal. 

For my thesis project, the most ambitious of these works, I wanted to try something more introspective. I wanted to turn that eye inward at the parts of myself I never want to look at or understand. And thus began making my piece processing my often unexamined trauma regarding a close friend of mine who committed suicide when I was eleven years old. A broken mirror implies a point of impact, the moment when things shatter, and the yarn lining the shards represents the softening of those sharp edges. Reconstructing the mirror into a new form represents my own journey to reclaiming what has happened, and making sense of it. I hope viewing this art feels as visceral and as exposed as making it made me feel.