STATEMENT OF WORK

Consistently present in my work are nature, movement, and the body. My physical process begins with gestures of color. Color creates form, which I instinctively react to. I define and clarify these forms by scraping away and adding on.

Currently I'm working on mixed media paintings on canvas and fabric, some with fabric collaged or woven into the canvas. The fabric I use is embedded with personal history: a favorite old dress, my grandmother’s curtains. Memory is a reference point for shape and mood. For example, the curve of the Arabesque bathroom tiles from my childhood, the markings of a house plant, or the thickness of a person’s thighs. By transforming the materials and ideas through layering and erasing, I’m transforming the personal stories attached to them, creating psychic space for myself. 

I have a visceral reaction to color, texture, and line. I want shapes that hug, caress, lean on, or distance themselves. The relationship between these animated forms, and the spaces in between, creates meaning. The mixing of mediums (which may include oil paint, fluorescent acrylic, water based oil, pastels, spray paint, and graphite) creates tactile surfaces at once both soft and rough, shiny and dull, agitated and quiet. These describe both external states of physicality and internal states of mind. 

The finished work marks a moment in time, but keeps moving, keeps questioning, creating a context for experience rather than a quick reading.