STATEMENT OF WORK

Throughout my life, I’ve been a nomad and seeker. Painting landscapes is my way of deepening and extending my roots, reorganizing my travels and interpreting nature. I am partially an imprint of indigenous lands and a creator of my own terrain. Born in Brazil, I was raised in the war-torn coasts of the Middle East. I live with collective narratives of roaming those shared grounds.

The landscape is our body: our forebear, our womb, our origin, and our destination. I paint the Earth to capture the world and use pigment to create my chosen native land. It breathes with me as I work. My process entails layering, pouring, dripping, spilling, erasure, and mark-making. I transform surfaces and images as they emerge and solidify, then alter again as the piece is molded, exposing the rich soil of the under-paint. My impulses to both destroy and create are visible.

Motherhood has taught me patience and the ability to see the earth in all its complex fertility. I travel with the canvas. From stained rags and torn discarded clothing there is an alchemical suggestion of women’s lives: their labor, abandonment, and recycled life and matter. My work alludes to the inner body and its paths and quests; it combines abstraction and magical realism. Cracked, flooded, and hybridized landforms in multiple climates are collective tales of migration in all their tragic and uplifting moments. Sunken houses, tent-specked mountains, cairns and rubble, wrecked trees, fauna, and flora appear in flattened or skewed perspectives. Trees can be anchors, and a prickly pear grows in snow. Conflict, renewal, and repair are synergistic.