I use couture millinery and embellishment techniques to build sculptures with felt and embroidered beadwork that illustrate my own experience of childhood sexual trauma, survival, and healing. Detailed beading and cyclical patterning emphasize the consistent labor in the repetitive motion of hand-sewing which mirrors the emotional and psychic labor expended in order to manage the suffering a body can accumulate over time. This work also calls on a knowledge of the fashion industry and textile production to think through how we turn to luxury as escapism in times of existential crisis. For example, my compositions include signifiers of status seen in the wealthy community where I grew up rendered in the same materials and processes that are often used in trades that exploit children while enriching the already rich to show how displays of power and glamour can act to gloss over the atrocities we don't want others to see, or that we don't want to look at within ourselves. Whether illustrating symbols of childhood abuse, its resultant patterns of thought and behavior, or the process of healing, my sculptures translate the life experience of a survivor of complex trauma through the lens of glittering beadwork, rendering a harrowing reality easier to digest.