Olly Olly Oxen Free is a multidisciplinary exhibition that explores the role of the artist as a “wounded healer,” interweaving personal history, psychoanalytic insight, and creative practice. Bridging my careers as both a visual artist and physician-psychoanalyst, the work investigates how emotional wounds—personal, cultural, and collective—can become sites of transformation and resistance through art.

Emerging from the pandemic into a climate of escalating cultural marginalization, works such as Olly Olly Oxen Free, It’s a Texas Thing, and Jazz Hands explore themes of exclusion and belonging in a Texas landscape shaped by regressive policy post Roe v Wade.

This work is not only autobiographical but operates as a cultural mirror, using materials like steel, plaster, photographs and reclaimed objects to forge ritualistic totems of grief and resistance. In reclaiming artistic identity within the frame of therapeutic practice, I assert that creativity and vulnerability are tools for both personal metamorphosis and social critique.

Ultimately, Olly Olly Oxen Free is a call to step out of hiding, into the light—an invitation for artist and viewer alike to witness, to feel, and to heal.