I don’t like blueberries anymore (in progress)


bass shaker, speaker wire, blueberry farms, top surgery, subwoofer plate, a deepening voice, sound pitched to sub frequencies, testosterone

I Don’t Like Blueberries Anymore is a forty-piece series of porcelain tiles that treats sound as both method and material to explore the formation, rupture, and ongoing negotiation of transgender identity. The work draws from community-based interviews with four trans people—three in Tennessee and one in Virginia—places where I have lived and remain deeply connected.

Each tile is laser-etched with drawings generated from these conversations, translating spoken experience into material form. The title comes from one participant’s reflection on the physical and emotional shifts of transition. Raised on a blueberry farm, they described how the fruit—once associated with sweetness—came to embody the rigid gender norms of the American South. Over time, those norms, like the berries themselves, soured.

Sonic abstraction:



Audio analysis translates the voices into data as a first step toward material form. The blue line traces pitch across select spectrograms.


Across copar.mp3, hormone.mp3, and pass.mp3, the same voice appears at different moments during hormone replacement therapy (HRT), revealing gradual shifts in pitch and resonance. Copar carries a brighter, higher harmonic range; in hormone, the voice sits lower with longer pauses; and in pass, it settles into a deeper, steadier register with energy concentrated in the lower frequencies—changes consistent with HRT’s effect on the vocal folds. In contrast, deya.mp3, spoken by a different person, has a distinct tonal fingerprint: a softer, low-frequency presence with extended quiet intervals across a long-form recording. Together, these spectrograms trace how hormonal transition and individual expression shape vocal presence over time.



I then used fractal images to translate audio data into image—and eventually next material. Loudness and pitch are extracted from the voice and mapped to the fractal’s parameters, so shifts in sound subtly reshape the image over time. Iterated thousands of times, the process produces a dense, ink-like image, where darker areas mark repeated motion.

porcelain tiles