ARTIST STATEMENT

I am an interdisciplinary artist, working in painting, textiles, bookmaking, and more.

I explore feelings of place and memory using identity, autonomy, and play.
Layering marks over long periods of time, I weave together paint, intuitive drawing, and luminescent materials. These sculpted and emotive, abstracted landscapes are composed of hybrid creatures shifting identity and form — a complex hide and seek puzzle with infinite possibilities. These worlds come from memories of time and place that feel so incredibly vivid - but often fail to be describable.

I work with an array of materials. While I make oil paint with raw pigments, allowing me to control every bit of sheen and surface texture, I use thick tube paint just as much. Crayon, drafting, and glimmering materials like 24k gold and miniature glass mosaic are some of my favorite things to include. These materials with contrasting luminescence allow me to create image within image, along with conflicting visual planes that bounce animals back and forth between figuration, landscape, or abstraction.

I want to be able to stand before my pieces for hours, playing in another world, continually finding something new. Pareidolia is the concept we are all so familiar with: searching in the sky, finding a familiar shape in the clouds. Even though it’s autonomous we often ask someone, do you see that too? There is a magic that happens when you escape the something real right before you to play in a new world — one that only you can see, allowing you the freedom to change your mind about what is within it, at any moment. While these spaces began as an immediate relief from childhood trauma and disability, they have become a language to describe elusive memory of place and self.