Excavating Self was created between January and April 2023 and is comprised of two series and other additional works. It starts and ends with a set of self portraits that reflect on the experience before and after creating this body of work. The first series, On Sacrifice, draws on experiences from a previous relationship, the feelings surrounding them, and the emotional fallout of the breakup. The second series, Juntos, explores relationships with family, past and current loves, and the way these relationships shape understanding of identity. The remaining pieces focus on topics such as ancestry, gender expression, and sexuality. Other central themes include self discovery, preserving memory, and love in all of its multiple truths. All pieces were created using intaglio printmaking techniques with hand written text.

Magic as a practice can be found in cultures all throughout history and well into the contemporary age. Love magic specifically is a type of magic intended to promote feelings of attraction or desire, love and/or intimacy in another person. Despite some pretty compelling negative aspects of love magic, like its historically violent and controlling nature, its implications of problematic neurotic behavior, or the coercive, nonconsensual impacts of its effects, I argue that on an individual level it can have many benefits that make it a worthwhile therapeutic practice. For the spell caster, it can function as a stress-relieving response in uncontrollable situations, as well as a form of communication in instances where direct communication isn’t possible. These beneficial claims have been corroborated with many cultural and psychological studies and connect the seemingly fantastical idea of love magic to the scientific world.

This is a collection of short stories surrounding the life of a person whose heart is broken. It documents the experiences of a range of people: a therapist in a psychiatric ward, a desperate housewife, a haggard professor, a famous composer, in various locations from New York City, to the deserts of the Southwest, to the calm of coastal California. It is an attempt to show the impact of grief and loss on the human heart and mind, and how the psychological impact of such a tragedy can seep into the lives of countless others, so interconnected is our presence on this planet. This is a book about pain, life, and love. Most of all, it is a book about memory, that illusory thing which taunts and tempts us all. I hope only that this work makes the reader feel in communion with the characters, so that they may sense what they - and ostensibly, the author - feel in their hearts and minds.