 I first realized I was my passion probably in kindergarten, mostly because I was drawn to my art class or I was drawn to any creative project that we did. I started taking woodworking in high school. I took a wood shop class and just remember the moment of being in my wood shop class and thinking, I love to do this. I've always loved art, I've always loved the home, and I've always loved 3D building. So it was just kind of like made sense and kind of clicked. I've always been around furniture. I've always been going to antique stores with my mom or flea markets and we've always been finding furniture. So at a young age I was always drawn to furniture or redoing my bedroom or things like that, moving furniture around. My life has revolved around furniture and spaces in the home. While my mother is an interior designer, so my whole life the home's been really important and the objects that she's put in the home and the environment that she's created. So my memories of the home and furniture are very vivid. So I'm always thinking about my past when I'm thinking about what I'm making. The emotional impact that my home has had on me or the structure that my mom created through making a really comfortable environment for me to grow up in. I think that's so important. So I feel like my work, I'm trying to create that comfort that I felt my mom created for me. I want to create an environment for you to interact with. So if you're entering the space that my furniture is in, I would like for a different feeling or I would like for you to sort of you're in a different environment. You're feeling different about the objects that you're surrounded by. I'm not only designing functional objects, I want to be designing functional objects that are evoking emotion or creating a feeling. So it's not only about function for me. Right now I'm really interested in chairs, mainly because I feel any piece of furniture, your body doesn't interact as much with any other piece of furniture, but a chair, a chair is supporting you and it's a give and take relationship with the chair. So I feel like it's more of an intimate relationship than a table. I want to be making things for people and to help people or create feelings for people or comfort for people. I would like it to be an escape or be a time where you can appreciate your surroundings and not necessarily be thinking about things going on in the world or things going on in your life. I think I've always had a certain aesthetic or a certain drawn to certain material choices, but through my aesthetic has definitely developed from freshman year till now. But I'm always thinking about simplifying things, I'm always thinking about using more natural kind of muted colors. So I think just through being at school and having different classes and we're kind of forced to start building our aesthetic and figuring out what our work looks like. Last year I had a very like muted color palette. This year I'm bringing color back into my work. I'm sort of like afraid of color a little bit. So I've been slowly trying to bring it into my work, but I use wood and the tones of wood and some neutral colors mostly. I mean, I came in knowing I want to be a woodworker and took a woodworking class right away, so I was very focused. But I think that it's aesthetically has evolved and conceptually has evolved a lot just through learning and being exposed to more techniques and things that I had no idea you could do with wood. I think the day that I walked into the doors here, I knew that this was a perfect place for me. I came into the fifth floor wood shop when we still had it and knew that that was the perfect environment to learn and really just grow. So it's definitely just exposing to new techniques, it made me think of life totally differently, not only my work but my life has completely changed and for the better because of Mecca.