A Practice of Embodiment
An exploration of what it means to be present online, and how I choose to show up in those spaces.
Kati McHugh
Depth Study
A collage contrasting two contemporary artists and how they each explore a subversive creative practice through analog crafts and digital content creation.
Hi, I'm Poison Oak
Poison Oak is a drag-inflected interpretive persona I created to discuss plants, wildfire, and environmental justice without being dismissed as “woo” or nostalgia. The character aims to reframe eco-monsters as neighbors who can teach us about boundaries, care, and accountability in the Anthropocene.
Polyglot Open Space Tour: California Coastal Trail at Wavecrest
This soundmapping project invites listeners and visitors to experience a coastal bluff through the shifting textures of its acoustic life.
Reaching Herd Immunity in a Sea of Fake News
An artistic exploration of the long, entwined histories of misinformation and vaccine hesitancy, and their contemporary implications.
The Beat Goes On
Anna Elizabeth Laube and the Spirit of Countercultural Folk Music
p5.js Blackberry Harvest
My inner dichotomy between an ecological, land-based lifestyle and my relationship with technology were deeply at play as I ideated and executed this interactive coding project.
Mother Nature is Beat
Di Prima does not romanticize resistance in her literary works; she embodies the ferocity of feminine strength.
Strawberry Fields Forever… but make it Vertical Growth
Vertical farming promises perfect berries through engineered control, but tech culture’s obsession with optimization and certainty is ill-suited to the messy, relational realities of growing real food.
Know Your Enemy
For this text-as-image graphic design assignment, I highlighted anti-authoritarian parallels between 1992 and 2024 by quoting Rage Against the Machine song lyrics.
The Fix is in on Food
Food-tech boosters promise “modern foods” engineered like software, but this Silicon Valley logic (optimization and substitutionalism) misses the messy, biological, and social realities that actually make food systems work.
If [Love+Money>Money], then is [Love>Love+Money]?
Jessica Jackley describes love as a “desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person’s life." I counter that this taints her microlending pitch.
UCSC Pivot Party
Being able to return to what I thought was an abandoned photojournalism degree path with a social justice focus will ensure I thrive in my time at UCSC.