Art has always carried memory for Indigenous peoples. It records our histories, honors our ancestors, and reflects the changes moving through our families, lands, and communities. As a Northern Ute artist, I use beadwork, photography, digital mixed media, and Indigenous Storywork to create visual narratives centered on healing, recovery, memory, and cultural connection.

My work is deeply rooted in lived experience and in the stories surrounding addiction, grief, intergenerational trauma, and resilience within Indigenous communities. I see art as a way of documenting what our people are living through today, while remaining connected to the ways our ancestors recorded their own experiences through material, image, story, and place.

Glass beads hold a particular meaning within my practice. They were introduced to our ancestors through trade and the forces of colonization. Over generations, Indigenous people transformed these materials into expressions of identity, beauty, resistance, and cultural continuity. I continue this practice by using glass beads as a form of narrative storytelling. Each bead becomes part of a larger story, documenting both historical disruption and contemporary Indigenous experience.

In works such as Hooked: Breaking the Silence of Stigma, I combine Charlotte True Cut beads, buffalo teeth, smoked deer hide, and crystal beads to speak about the physical, emotional, cultural, and spiritual impacts of addiction. The beaded brain represents both injury and healing. It reflects the effects of substance use while also honoring the brain's ability to change, recover, and form new pathways.

My work asks viewers to look beyond addiction as an individual experience. Healing is connected to family, kinship, culture, land, memory, and spirit. Through visual storytelling, I seek to reclaim narratives too often defined through trauma and replace silence with story, relationship, and remembrance.

For me, art becomes a place where memory remains alive, where difficult stories are witnessed, and where healing begins to take form.

I also think the final sentence works beautifully as a standalone homepage statement: “Art becomes a place where memory remains alive, where difficult stories are witnessed, and where healing begins to take form.”