My tufted portraits celebrate the lives of rescue pets and animal adoption narratives and aim to reframe animal bodies in our culture. My early paintings featured pattern-rich interiors, including Chinoiserie wallpaper, Toile de Jouy pastoral prints, and Peacock chenille bedspreads. This animal imagery in art and textiles symbolized pedigree, luxury, and domesticated exoticism. In all, animal representation serves material wealth and displays its figurative body and literal skin as a souvenir. My goal is to update the idea of the bucolic textile or animal pelt rug into something both joyful and critical. For my current body of work, I am creating tufted paintings, using a traditional carpet-making technique of looping yarn through a backing cloth, to produce low relief full-body portraits of animals sleeping or rolling on their backs. I aim to refocus representational ownership to explore adoption narratives and to confront the contradictory beliefs about animal bodies in our culture.