STATEMENT OF WORK

The heart of my practice is abstracting archival imagery of unseen maritime landscape imagery inherited from my late grandfather through paintings and textiles. Sifting through film slides from my troubled family figure has allowed me to rebuild empathy and connect with a person who is intrinsically linked to me. He compulsively photographed his time working on freight ships for decades, beautifully capturing environments throughout his travels. It is an introspective and historical investigation centered around the interest in place, how it changes overtime and why it affects us all.

Alongside this personal tie, I explore environmental adaptations by integrating examinations of technological interventions of the natural world. I do this by exaggerating the color pallet that exists in these places. I am interested in blurring the timeline of when these spaces were experiences before and after a drastic alteration by human interruptions. Both allow me to challenge my perspectives by prompting an intergenerational conversation centered around witnessing and contributing to our natural world. My process revolves around painting full compositions of mine and my grandfather’s photos from the past and present. These hyper saturated compositions are then cut apart and sewn together to generate my imagined landscapes. I will be merging bright and graphic textile work with these paintings, to create dense terrain of my own. Sewn textile backgrounds will pull from the colors throughout the paintings and contrast the loose mark makings of paint.