). Here is Allen’s Artist Statement:
I was born a creative, landed feet first on earth hard-wired to make things. The process of art-creation is intuitive, instructive, and most necessary for me. Even before immigrating to the states as a young girl, in my infancy, I understood the fact that change is a constant. Early on I became aware of a need to make images by scratching pigment into things like paper, fabric, walls, floors, sand, soil into anything really. I found that if I illustrated from observation and memory, I could bring back or hold onto moments that were lost me like the face of my mother, hummingbirds in flight or a spot under my favorite tree listening to the elders share histories and her-stories. The story of the immigrant child is often one of lost memory or disconnection; in this way, my art has grown into my bones and has become the way that I capture artifacts and archetypes and re-create my own story to fill in the blank spaces; it is how I see myself in an ever-changing landscape.