STATEMENT OF WORK

I create artifacts that connect me to memory and mortality, place and presence.

 When I was young, I spent a lot of time sitting with my mother watching her needlepoint. She was bedridden with an ongoing assortment of cancers originating from a metastasized lump in her breast, which lead to her death at 37. The silk needlepoint she created is a physical object that I can hold; tactile evidence of her hand at work; an artifact that’s proof of her brief presence on the planet.

 Like my mother’s needlework, my process of making work is unhurried and contemplative. It begins by documenting the textures and forms I see in nature with photographs, honoring the autographic mark that place makes on a person. The photographs are decayed through digital reduction, much like the memory of a person or place as it starts to fade. This reduction intentionally acknowledges that the beauty of the natural world viewed through technology is never as magnificent as it is in person.

The visual images are methodically transferred to panel then painted using a small brush. What resembles a photograph from ten feet away, is a surface teeming with small stitch-like marks when engaged at close range, changing the way the viewer perceives the original object. The brushwork is reminiscent of needlework both in its application and in the emotional connection it invokes for me as the daughter of a stitcher. My mother made her mark with thread just as I make mine with paint. The objects we create form a generational chain, the artifacts we leave behind as mortal memory fades.