STATEMENT OF WORK

As a child, I spent weeks at a time hospitalized with lung disease. Through spells of sickness, I took solace in my imagination, drawing and redrawing hundreds of versions of the same subject—each act of repetition pulling me deeper into a realm where sickness could not find me. 

In spring 2020, quarantining with my family, first subconsciously and then consciously, I found myself reaching for the same comfort—the comfort of repetition—that I had decades earlier. Like the confines of a hospital room in Seattle, my world shrank to the size of my studio. Through the meditative and soothing process of creating, the uncertainty of living in a country ravaged by a novel virus dissipated. I disappeared into other worlds—amalgamations of imagery existing somewhere between memory and imagination. 

The result, Flower Mounds, is a cohesive series of verdant, undulating, biomorphic work. The series is an expression of my own exuberance for life and a love letter to the natural world, borne of a coping mechanism from early adolescence. Flower Mounds offers an escape into soft, surreal landscapes: a safe place to land.

Flower Mounds explores notions of home, not only in its connection to childhood comforts, but also to traditional Slavic art’s reverence for botanicals, a nod to my roots as a first generation American. Throughout the creation of this series, I thought often of the delight and solace my Slavic foremothers took in floral motif embroidery on garments, decorating the walls of homes with painted botanicals, decorated eggs and traditional Croatian silver filigree jewerly during tremulous times. 

Flower Mounds incorporates a wide breadth of unconventional materials, using only what I had already at home—including everything from sample house paint to mortar to Styrofoam. My commitment to the safety of quarantine unwavering, I began hand-making paper when my supply of other viable surfaces dwindled. To do this, I used, among other tools, a child’s plastic pool. On delicate paper, I painted rolling hills carpeted with flowers.

In Flower Mounds I have painted the soft green mountains in the Land of Enchantment, the desolate Sonoran Desert bathed in its warm, soapy hues, and the fireworks show that is a Californian Super Bloom, a veritable explosion of glowing orange.

As the death toll of the pandemic grew over months and then years, so too did the meaning of this body of work. I began to see similarities between Flower Mounds and the burial mounds of various global cultures in. Painting mounds of Day-Glo blooms shaped like headstones, I created a new and sacred space for grieving loss. 

That joie de vivre manifested in Flower Mounds connects deeply to ritual, to nature, to the Queer virtue of radical happiness, and to celebration as a sacred act of grieving. 

-March 2020, updated October 2021