STATEMENT OF WORK

Statement: Born in Boston into generations of New Englanders, I make materially dense paintings depicting regionally and personally specific objects. By recreating inherited family recipes, interior dining scenes, and kitchenscapes, I seek to understand and locate myself. I look to discover my identity within the truths and fictions of culture-making. I utilize cuisine and the tradition of still-life painting to digest the legacies of class, place, and history.

My practice is an alchemical exploration of acrylic paint: I pour, stencil, airbrush, and sand material into unexpectedly representational paintings. I transcribe my grandmother's handwritten recipes alongside 1970s Betty Crocker recipe cards, trompe l’oeil yet larger than life and loaded with materiality. While my work may seem initially photorealistic, each canvas dissolves into color, shape, and texture. By clashing together distinct paint languages, I disrupt the viewer’s expectations of visual coherence, calling attention to the mundane. I position the viewer to question: what is remembered and what is lost. I am the historian's unexpected assistant, an heir, and a translator. I create paintings that collapse generational visual culture, bringing regionally specific objects into circulation with a contemporary world. Unlike a historian, my work does not take final form as a thesis, but rather as a series of additional questions and observations bound up and investigated through the transformative qualities of painting.