When I stepped back from the gallery I was in a phase where I thought I wasn't going to be making work for a gallery context for a while. People were like, "You should never leave a gallery if you didn't have somewhere else to go," but I wasn't trying to disrespect the gallerists in that way.

I realized that was what was happening in my work already. I think that's where, as artists, we begin to master our craft: when we're able to step back and understand things.

Even though the art world goes through trends, you do know that it'll come up again.

I almost feel like if I didn't have the gallery and museum content it would be easy to get lost. People's attention spans are so short; they see something and it trends for a few days and then it goes away and something else comes.

It's interesting how as an artist you keep evolving, but if you can get into the contemporary art space, if the works are in institutions and museums, they keep living on and on and on, even if you move to a different space, that work is still operating.

I was trying to release emotions, exercise emotions, and then I entered the art world. Even after grad school, some of [the earlier works] were still lingering in my head. I realized there were some pieces where I felt that I had to respond to the criticism.

You can talk yourself out of doing something if you start to think about, "How would this person see it, or that person see it?" So sometimes it's allowing myself to be in it and not talking myself out of it.