STATEMENT OF WORK

This work focuses on the ways we use ritual, spirituality, and myths to create meaning and connect to that which is unknown. My paintings and sculptures use a symbolic and abstract language to channel ideas of creative energy and the ritualistic utility of art. The sculptures act as devotional objects while the paintings are an incantation of the energetic spirit. Touch is venerated in this work; learning and making with one’s hands is held up as sacred and essential.  I am interested in the desire for spiritual connection that I observe in contemporary culture, and how this often vague and unnamed longing mirrors sexual desire. Touch is distinctly earthly and bodily, while the spiritual is unbodied and untouchable. There is a wonderful tension between them. It is this space between that emerges in my paintings and sculptures. Recently, I have been looking at High Renaissance painting and sculpture and observing the importance and expression of hands and fingers, the convergence of the religious and the erotic, and the relation of the earthly to the spiritual. 

My work speaks to desire, longing, and something unnamable, that can only be expressed through the pictorial image or sculptural object. A thread that has run through multiple projects concerns the way that people imbue objects with the power to hold memory, tie the living to the dead, and connect past to present. A common object becomes a sacred vessel, often passed down through generations. The object becomes one of devotion, turned into a votive. This, to me, is a metaphor for the act of making art.