Artist Statement:

A house on stilts grows roots wrapped around crystals, its roof falling apart and conjoined with a satellite, it searches. Through drawing, print, collage and painting my artwork presents organic and human made structures in a shared field. In this field, structures collide and transform, crumble and decay, sprout and assemble. My creative research has been following a twisting path navigating around issues of ecology, architecture, our bodies and how we relate to one another.

I am inspired by errors in understanding, linguistic and social hiccups. Miscommunication, mis-remembrances, and misunderstandings mystify and mesmerize me. They mull about my mind like chimeric ships slamming into one another as my son makes stormy waves splashing in the bath tub. My work captures this uncertainty sometimes in landscapes decomposing as though some hidden actor is playing with the gravitational fields.

My most recent paintings engage these issues by personifying objects found in nature. A red mask tucked in wolfsbane leers, its driftwood carapace encrusted in bells. Rainbow threads cascade ornamented with pop tabs. Inspired by the Wilder Mann photo series by Charles Fréger, this recent body of work imagines that if humans dress in costumes to commune with nature, perhaps nature does the same to commune with humanity only to be tragically ignored as detritus. Working in watercolor, pencil and ink, I render clumps of technicolor lichen. Twigs, plants and fungi sprout hairy hoofed legs, don animal masks with wide open eyes, and festoon themselves with litter.



This series is also influenced by Victorian cabinets of curiosities. I am fascinated by how these proto-museum collections presented their subjects: often with a range of amateur science and whimsical wonder. By putting them behind glass, they reinforced the the illusory boundary between nature and humanity. The curiosities I paint mourn this disconnect, and call attention to what is ignored at the edges of our perception. They wear costumes of humanity in hopes that we will empathize with that which is not.