Artist Statement

I hope to generate immersive environments and experiences that offer space for catharsis, healing, and discovery within one’s surroundings and self. I believe in music as a powerful source for repair and communication and am grateful that my career as a performer allows me to form connections with people all around the world by sharing music in a wide range of styles and mediums. As a composer and improviser, both personally and universally, my work is focused on transforming grief and the effects of trauma into hopeful, healing lines.

I seek to honour and reflect connections with and within one’s body, as well as my personal experience being a queer, autistic person navigating an industry heavily steeped in conformity. I experience music as a multimodal medium that can reflect and unite the multi-sensory network of my environment just as much as it can shatter and refract it. And, having struggled with various forms of communication throughout my life, I have always felt compelled to use music as a way to engage with all who experience my work, and especially with those who feel restricted by or within traditional forms of communication. Although much of my career has been influenced by my training in Western European classical music, I am passionate about performing music written by living composers who draw inspiration from their own unique backgrounds, and discovering ways to expand the traditional lyricism of the cello beyond the existing frameworks of classical music making. 

Guided by these principals, I design, compose, and perform large-scale, continuous sets of music — solo and otherwise — requiring intense physical and emotional stamina, grounded in the repertoire and idiomatic tendencies of classical technique while also incorporating elements of metal, improvisation, and electronics. My work is often motivated by two seemingly contradictory attractions: to the absence of stimuli, particularly light, touch and sound; and to the tactile experience of creating and shaping sound on my instrument.

I try to maintain a very ‘let the bones speak’ approach in how I interpret music from the standard repertoire as well as how I approach new music, and I am inspired by collaboration and performance - in any medium - as an opportunity to transcend beyond the physical capacity of an instrument, a being, or a space. I have a fluid relationship with the concept of genre, tend to approach ideas with a stylistically fluid perspective, and return often to the essence of teachings by my lifelong teacher David Cole, that is to “love every note”.