Research

My research practice is driven by curiosity rather than a single subject. I move between history, mythology, art, culture, food, material life, science, and storytelling depending on what a project asks me to understand.

Research may begin with an archival document, a historical artwork, a recipe, a myth, a place, or a question I cannot stop thinking about. I use what I find to build visual art, writing, fashion, books, characters, and larger fictional worlds.

Borikén: History + Cultural Memory

2026–Present · Historical Research

An ongoing chronological study of Borikén, beginning before 1493 and continuing through colonization, migration, cultural transformation, and the present.

My research considers Indigenous society and material culture, early European encounters, colonization, resistance, diaspora, assimilation, family memory, and the ways history is recorded and later interpreted.

The work is documented through an expanding Borikén Research Bible containing primary sources, scholarship, timelines, vocabulary, citations, competing interpretations, and unanswered questions.

Holding Time + Site-Responsive Research

2026–Present · Historical + Site Research

Research into preservation, architecture, material history, archival silence, labor, human relationships, and the ways places accumulate meaning over time.

Initially developed through my independent study of Vizcaya and its Holding Time open call, this research expanded into broader questions surrounding temporal collapse, significant insignificants, preservation as authorship, specialized knowledge, and the people behind historical places.

I am particularly interested in what becomes possible when historians, artists, conservators, craftspeople, researchers, and other specialists are allowed to approach the same question from different forms of knowledge.

International Culinary Study

2024–Present · Culinary Research

An evolving culinary research project developed through two years of cooking, recipe testing, comparison, documentation, and experimentation with international cuisine.

My research has a strong interest in Eastern cuisines and cooking traditions while continuing to move across regions and cultures. I study ingredients, seasoning, technique, texture, preparation, regional variation, and the ways food changes as it moves between households and generations.

A major part of the project is learning how to create deeply flavorful food without depending on excessively greasy, heavy, or unhealthy preparation. I am particularly interested in techniques that use vegetables, herbs, spices, fermentation, broths, grains, seafood, and thoughtful preparation to create satisfying everyday meals.

Since the project’s conception, 58 recipes have been developed and documented, with recipes being organized toward several distinct cookbook series rather than a single publication. Each series allows a different area of culinary study to be explored while contributing to a larger practical archive of techniques, flavors, and tested recipes.

The project continues to grow through repeated practice: cooking, adjusting, documenting, and returning to recipes until they are worth preserving.

Fashion + Material Culture

2021–Present · Design Research

Research into clothing, textiles, natural materials, climate, historical dress, craftsmanship, and the relationship between culture and what people wear.

Borikén is one important area of this research, particularly as I develop POMPOKII’s fashion language, but the study extends internationally across historical periods, designers, materials, silhouettes, social classes, environments, and methods of construction.

The goal is to understand clothing as material culture before treating it as decoration.

Multifaceted Ascension

2019–Present · Worldbuilding + Narrative Research

An expanding fictional universe that allows many of these research interests to collide.

History, mythology, spirituality, astronomy, psychology, memory, identity, science, and speculative storytelling become material for characters, environments, visual art, writing, and imagined histories.

Documented history provides a foundation, but it remains deliberately distinct from interpretation and invention.

Art History + Visual Culture

Ongoing · Visual Research

I study artists, artworks, historical aesthetics, and visual traditions as a way of understanding how other people have approached emotion, symbolism, composition, beauty, storytelling, and the human figure.

My references are intentionally broad, moving between ancient art, mythology, European painting and decorative traditions, and contemporary visual culture. Works such as Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss become points of reference not simply for their aesthetics, but for what they reveal about intimacy, relationships, desire, identity, and the people who made and experienced them.

I often use history as a way to dissect myself. Looking at how people before me represented love, grief, conflict, spirituality, beauty, violence, family, and survival gives me a point of reference for examining my own experiences. That process allows research to become a tool for self-inquiry: a way to recognize patterns, challenge what I have inherited, and better understand what I want to carry forward or change.

Rather than reproducing a historical style, I am interested in using the past as something to think with. Studying what others have made helps me understand myself more clearly, and making from that understanding has become part of how I heal and grow.

Mythology, Spirituality + Human Storytelling

Ongoing · Cultural + Narrative Research

Taíno mythology and spirituality form the core of my mythological research, particularly as I study Borikén and the ways belief, nature, ancestry, cosmology, and storytelling shaped how people understood their world.

From that foundation, my research expands outward into other traditions, including American folklore and mythology, Abrahamic religions, Eastern spiritual and mythological traditions, and Greek mythology. These influences appear throughout my visual work and worldbuilding, sometimes independently and sometimes in conversation with one another.

I am particularly interested in the similarities and contradictions that emerge between cultures separated by geography, belief, and time: recurring ideas about creation, death, nature, divinity, morality, transformation, ancestors, and humanity’s place within a larger universe.

Research Methods

Primary Sources · Archival Research · Art History · Historical Scholarship · Archaeology · Comparative Research · Site Study · Material Culture · Visual Analysis · Mythology · Culinary Experimentation · Recipe Testing · Design Research · Source Verification · Worldbuilding