I am an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, textiles, bookmaking, and more.
My work explores the elusive nature of identity alongside feelings of place and time. Through intuitive mark making and play, I create complex animal composites embedded into abstracted landscapes. My process involves layering individual marks over time with responsive drawing, while combining a wide array of materials with texture and luminescence.
These sculpted and emotive, abstracted landscapes are composed of hybrid creatures shifting identity and form — an intricate hide and seek puzzle with infinite possibilities, a completely autonomous experience for the viewer. These worlds come from memories of time and place that feel so incredibly vivid and distinct - but fail to be describable.
I work with an array of materials. I make my own oil paint with raw pigments, allowing me to use rare pigments, and control every bit of sheen and surface texture. I also use thick tube paint and ready made products - 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, and 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 — much like identity, its 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 the elusive feeling of an ever changing self.