STATEMENT OF WORK

I make color-driven oil paintings and works on paper that explore motherhood, the visibility/availability of the female figure, and a desire for connection with the natural world. My recent work features imagined landscapes populated with female figures, bodies of water, and objects and imagery that code as feminine. My paintings are in dialogue with historical depictions of the female body in nature where the body is presented as something for the viewer to consume, and where nature exists as a passive backdrop for that relationship. In my own work, I seek to limit the viewer’s access to the female figure while at the same time activating the landscape as a vibrant and energetic presence of its own.

For my 2020 exhibition, Summer’s Eve, I created a series of paintings that considered the archetype of the punished woman. I utilized compositional techniques to create distance between the viewer and the subjects to explore the idea of the figure withholding something from the viewer, and in that secrecy, gaining something for herself. My 2021 exhibition, If She Floats, continued this thread, using the image of a pool of water to reference the history of women accused of being witches and then drowned during “swim tests.” Rather than a place of peril, I explored water as a space of possibility, for birth and for transformation. This series introduced goddesses and earth spirits, and I began using the pool as a barrier between the figures and the viewer. The pool of water remains a central image in my newest work. These paintings feature female figures who commune with nature and with their own reflections. Portals are a recurring image, and the landscapes are lush and alluring.

My practice is motivated by the tradition in Western art history of depicting the female body as an object to be looked upon, rather than a subject herself. In my own work, I seek to complicate the viewer’s ability to fully consume my paintings and the female figures therein. I do this in many ways: I utilize cropping, overlapping, color shifts, and moments of abstraction; I build the figures in loose and overlapping layers; I imply a narrative that remains unresolved; I cast the figure’s gaze outside the canvas where the viewer cannot meet it. I’m interested in the idea of a painting keeping secrets, and for me these strategies allow my paintings to hold something back from the viewer.

The central figures in my recent work are mothers: they hold swollen bellies, await the transformation of birth, and bask in the presence of new life. Yet to have a mother-body is to be always precarious. Intertwined in these depictions of motherhood are elements of danger: stormy skies, claw-like waves on the water, and portals to the unknown. Like Cezanne’s bathers, my figures approach the water as a space of potential pleasure, but danger is also present. My intention is to imbue my figures with a complexity and subjectivity such that they cannot be fully known.