Artist Statement
“I wanted the pleasures and politics of the fragment… the randomness of chance and a sense of inevitability, sincerity while using [collage] and pastiche.”
“The system is a grid for life to work around.”
- Communal Nude, collected essays, Robert Gluck
I can’t get away from my body, nor do I want to. Constantly seeking embodiment, grounded-ness. Like the present, the body seems in a constant state of escape; fleeting, transient, in motion, hollowing out, leaving behinds its marks, traces, impressions, odors, oils, stains…
Figures embracing, entangling, mingling, entwining, blocks of color kissing, caressing… soft, tender, quiet, moments. Indulgences of pleasure commonly reserved, hidden, kept secret. Privacy cloaks us in mystery. Encounters wrongfully dismissed, as if these aren’t the delicacies of living, now exposed, on celebratory display, exalted. Not quite erotic, but liminal, on the precipice. All relationships are ambiguously disorienting. We collapse. We merge. We bleed.
I am constantly attracted to and creating images of touch, attempting to foster the critical space of emotion. I’m interested in dichotomies: attraction and repulsion, holding on and letting go, independence and belonging, individuality and uniformity, what is hidden and what is revealed, private and public, personal and political.
My most recent body of work is all about the fragment and its combination with other fragments in the hope of invoking relation. Materially vast and experimental, each work is an unorthodox amalgamation of sapience, “a Frankenstein” or exquisite corpse so to speak. These works take systems, the grid or matrix of weaving and the history of painting for example, and screw with both systems by conjoining them to create a vivacious result. These works steadfastly pursue tactility and embodiment, the experience of self in relation to other, and intimacy revealed. Having consistently pursued figuration in my practice, these works become more abstracted into shapes and colors, obscured by pattern and layering, complicated through material difference, and cut into to offer revealing points to see through.
