Artist Statement
“If you think of shape as figure/ground, then every shape is a figure and the ground is the whole world.” –Amy Sillman
My work is about the shape of the body and its similarities to other living things. Bodies, like leaves of plants, have a central midline from which they expand outwards in bilateral symmetry. Both are organic in shape and shift in response to gravity and the environment.
I paint large unstretched canvases using my entire body. My process involves crawling around on the canvas and scrubbing the paint into the surface with my feet, knees and both of my hands. Working this way mimics the bilateral symmetry of my subject matter. Furthermore, working wet on wet on the floor allows the paint to saturate the canvas creating a two-sided work. Each piece consists of a field of saturated color, often fading toward its edges, alluding to the process of entropy. The canvases are thin like leaves and hang with gravity, revealing a glimpse of their underbellies otherwise hidden from view. My pieces play with perception, dancing between the illusionistic space created through the depth of color, and the collapsing of that space into a physical object through the draping of the canvas.
The figures that make up my recent work are large protective bodies that hold space for the viewer to contemplate their own relationship to the present moment, their physical body, and their similarities to other forms in nature.
