The performance "What Once Was" embraces messiness, moving through the past via spoken word, video, old photographs, and letters from former romantic relationships. The work considers longing and loss, the inheritance of desire, and the quiet shame placed on female sexuality, while asserting a reclaimed female identity.

As a child, I sat on my sister’s 1970s pink shag rug, watching her with her boyfriend. I wanted what I thought I saw—love, attention, belonging. I wanted to be old enough to step into that world. Only later did I understand that adult relationships are far more complicated than the fantasies formed in childhood. They accumulate over time, shaped by memory, rupture, tenderness, and grief.

Video installation and performance allow me to work through repetition and layering—images returning, voices overlapping, gestures reappearing. This cyclical structure mirrors how memory functions: nonlinear, fragmented, and insistent. The past does not arrive neatly; it repeats, interrupts, and resists clarity.