STATEMENT OF WORK

My practice is an exploration of painting and craft. 

I treat each painting like a sculpture, or at least like a garment of clothing, a sculptural craft, with the stretcher bars acting as mannequin. My materials (fabric, dye, bleach, thread…) and processes (tie-dye, shibori, machine sewing, zigzag stitches…) connect my paintings to textile craft traditions, but involve painterly interrogations of space, color, and perception.

I am interested in the objecthood of images, and my work focuses on woven structures as a site of conflict between image and material, surface and depth. I seek iterations of abstraction that represent a unity of form and content. In the case of my recent work: wonky and handmade but otherworldy, images indivisible from their material form and dimensions, confounding to cycloptic cameras but uncannily familiar to in-person eyes.

I believe a painting is something to be experienced IRL, but the internet has coerced the medium into accepting the primacy of flatness and pixelization. Rather than building on a canvas with 3-dimensional color, I dye canvas and thread sidewise via osmosis, leaving the woven surface uncovered. Textiles and the digital world have been connected since the invention of the punchcard for the Jacquard loom. My current paintings take an anti-impasto, quasi-digital form, but seek alternative ways of rendering painterly depth, light, and movement.

I accept the creative act as a collaboration between intention and entropy, and I embrace this half-control as a way to create paintings balanced between human touch and immaculate conception.