STATEMENT OF WORK

My work draws on the bodily experience of extreme emotional events and the afterimages they leave behind. As a kid, I struggled with night terrors. I would wake up in a panic, my brain churning with formless anxiety. These feelings would often take on a repetitive visual form in my mind. I learned that getting out of bed and making a drawing that represented the sensations I was experiencing could calm me. Once it was on the page, the tension was released, and I could begin to understand what was happening.

This process of translating physical sensations into visual compositions remains at the heart of what I make. Now that I’m older, it becomes a kind of exercise in awareness, locating the somatic markers that indicate mood and feeling and allowing those to expand into color and form in my imagination. The images become places that I can return to over and over again, a kind of devotion that helps me make sense it all.

There is reverence and ritual in the making, too. I build up layers of texture with gesso, marble dust and pumice. I push washes of color across the surface. Because I work on unstretched canvas, edges curl and warp, and the pieces generally refuse to hang politely on the wall. It’s way of saying these works aren’t complete. Nothing is permanent. They are drawings, diagrammatic, pointing the way to the next image.