Artist's Eye

Beyond writing, I enjoy other forms of artistic expression including photography, watercolor and mixed media, sculpture, jewelry making, and pottery. I started creating art at a young age and have always found it to be an essential medium that helps communicate about important issues in a way words cannot. Because of this, I like to highlight nature in my work to display all the beauty we need to work together to conserve.

On this page, you'll find examples of my art in various mediums.

Photography

Over the past several years of finding inspiration while traveling for school and work, I've developed a love for photography. Often, I'll even paint some of my photos later on, which allows me to relive the memory of a place while re-capturing the view more precisely from my own perspective, using colors, shapes, and textures that capture how each place felt to me. Generally in my photography, I like to highlight the splendor and power of the natural world, getting people to look at an image I've taken and think, "Wow, how incredible is it that I live in the same timeline as that beautiful view?"

Science in the Southern Sea

I captured this shot while on the Antarctic research cruise that took me from Lyttelton, NZ, to the Ross Sea, off the west coast of Antarctica. The photo won third place in the Stanford University Doerr School of Sustainability Photo Contest in 2025.

Mount Cook's Glacial Milk

I captured this photo upon returning from Antarctica, traveling around the South Island, NZ. The image was used by Stanford Earth Systems department in an annual report to foundational donors of the school.

Watercolor and Mixed Media

My longest-standing artistic medium is watercolor, as I can vividly remember painting some wild pieces even in preschool. It's safe to say my technique has improved over the years, but regardless, it's a medium I know I will continue for years to come. Over time, I have begun combining watercolor with other mediums including pastel, colored pencil, and acrylic. I enjoy the way these "mixed media" pieces turn out, because it helps me highlight certain parts of a work more than others, blend things differently, create new colors, and altogether express my artistic vision with even more accuracy.

Often, my paintings are simply for the sake of highlighting natural beauty in a way that photography can't, to show the inspiration that one can get from the natural world if you are looking closely enough and tuning into the feelings it evokes within you.

In High Seas or Low Seas

My paintings are often inspired by life teeming just below the ocean waves. I have painted icebergs I saw in the South Pacific Ocean, salmon in the Klamath River, ships, tidepools, sea creatures, and oceanscapes over the years. This is a group of some of my paintings, now framed and hanging in my home!

Pop-Up Program Illustrations

For my predator-prey interactions pop-up program that I presented in Tuolumne Meadows, I created these hand-drawn illustrations of each animal with information about how they respond to threats on the back side of each drawing.

Weekly Watercolor

I paint a small watercolor piece once a week in an effort to focus less on perfection in each painting I create and more on maintaining my art practice, even in busy times. I started this practice while finishing my last quarter of university.

May Comfort and Adventure Always Follow: A Traveler's Guide to Life Abroad

A picture book gift for my mom, which I wrote and illustrated when she moved to Cambridge, UK, in early 2026. Shown is the front and back cover, along with a couple pages.

Platinum

Here's an example of a time when I took a picture of a moment I witnessed first, then painted the image later to recapture the memory. This is Platinum, a rescued horse I worked with while volunteering at a horse stable in high school. I trained the horses while teaching children to ride.

Home, Whever You Are

Sculpture

While studying at Stanford, I took two sculpture classes. I worked with clay to hand-build sculptural pieces, but also learned woodworking and welding techniques. Sculpture was a really fun artistic medium to work with because with the works being three-demensional, I was able to express more complex ideas with each piece. I appreciated that ceramic, wood, and metal were mediums that lended themselves well to deeper meanings in each final piece.

I loved woodworking; for the wooden shell piece in the image on the left panel, I was inspired by the Oregon state shell, the hairy triton, turning a piece of a tree that had been trimmed on campus into something new and beautiful, breathing new life into it. It was a piece that was inspired by my first home, made with a piece of my new home, representing the homes of many marine organisms.

Beauty Entrapped

Inspired by the suffering of marine life in ever-more polluted seas as they get tangled in man-made objects, I created this piece using clay hand-building techniques to make and glaze five marine mammals. I used wire to attach each animal to a piece of metal wire that I had bent and welded to get my desired sprial shape. Despite the challenges they face, marine life battles on in beauty and grace, and we can help protect them from ourselves.

Balance

This piece takes after rock piles seen on hiking trails along rivers, representing how nature brings us peace and balance even in an ever-moving world. Though rocks are hard and rough, they can even create a soft and tender feeling when making a balanced pile like this. Each rock here is made of different materials: stuffed and sewn rocks, a chicken wire rock, a felted rock, a wooden rock, a paper rock; sitting atop a hand-carved piece of bark, like a rushing river.

Mending

These vases were another feat of hand-building, inspired by vases beloved by two female figures in my life, full of flowers representing the people closest to me. I built these vases from clay, fired them in the kiln, then intentionally broke them in order to glaze and put them back together later. I mended them using the Japanese arts of kintsugi (gold mending) and sashiko, bringing textile mending into an otherwise hard artistic medium.

Jewelry

Another artistic medium I picked up a handful of years ago was jewelry making. During the Covid lockdown days, I started my own Etsy shop to sell my wares (link here: ChezCara), and because I didn't have much contact with the outside world then, I didn't make many sales beyond my own group of family and friends. Still, I kept going and have continued to create jewelry for myself that I often wear to work as a park ranger. Visitors so often ask where my earrings are from, I recently decided to reopen my shop so they could find me on Etsy and I will begin creating more jewelry to sell again very soon!

(Note: None of the earrings shown in the image carousel to the right are available for purchase right now, but all my earrings are made to order if any are of interest.)

Pottery

I began pottery in late July 2026 after a years-long desire to learn the craft but never quite having access to it. As soon as I started, I found it to be an incredible outlet for me as I navigated starting a new job and living in a new city. I have improved a great deal over the past roughly 2.5 months of practice and have no plans to stop, as it's been such a fun medium to learn and there is so much left to explore. I even have plans of expanding ChezCara (my Etsy shop) beyond my jewelry pieces, to include some of my pottery!

Bonus: The art of baking!

Check out my cooking Instagram page:

Baking is another fun outlet for me--I particularly enjoy baking and decorating cakes. My main social media pages are linked in the "About & Contact" page.

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