I am a visual artist with a focus on painting and drawing. Making art has been a means of understanding and engaging with my world since I was a child. I work with traditional materials: oil paint, charcoal, paper, wooden panels. I like the simplicity of these materials, their natural characteristics. Soil, seeds, trees: these things have life in them. My process is highly intuitive and open, evolving in the moment, like a living being, a wild thing. Inspiration comes to me in many forms: a color, a word, a stranger on the street. It can come from an emotion or an idea, or something as simple as the act of holding a pencil. The origin doesn’t really matter; where it begins is only the beginning. What is more important is where it goes and what happens along the way, what gets recorded, what gets erased. I love the living world in all its forms, the temporal and changing nature of being, the wild, mysterious, and the unknown. I live in Philadelphia.
For the past several years I have been creating a personal mythology through my paintings, the aim of which is to combine fragments of time and space as a means of interpreting existence. The process is similar to collage; images are combined and altered to create a space that is both literal and mythical. Photography is often the starting point. I photograph things around me: people on the street, buildings, trees, sidewalks. This manifests the work in my physical surroundings. The main focus is usually a figure which becomes the basis for a fiction I create around the mystery of another being. From there, the work builds through a process that relies on chance and fate, like a throw of the dice; in this way it becomes a dialogue with the cosmos, allowing input from both sides. The result is a combination of representation and abstraction which breaks the surface of reality to reveal a glimpse of the eternal in a constructed moment.
In 2020 I started a new series exploring anxiety and ritualistic healing. Using knots as symbols of anxiety- stomach knots, muscle tension- the work scrutinizes negative emotions and, by finding beauty in them, renders them impotent. Knots also hold together what might otherwise fall apart. So they are a potent symbol of unity as well. And when organized, they can be woven into something that gives warmth, comfort and protection. Traditionally associated with women, weaving is a powerful expression of egalitarianism and a necessary antidote to the hierarchical and authoritarian thinking which threatens our very existence. Translated into paint, these weavings lose their functional value and become symbols, applicable to whole societies and landscapes.