Artist Statement

            The past few years have been a transitory time in my life.  I received my Bachelors of Fine Art’s degree two years ago, and in the interim I’ve tried new kinds of teaching jobs, stepped back from the bar job I’ve held for 14 years, and generally wondered what my place in the world would be. In the short time since graduating, I’ve experienced loss and grief at a swifter rate than I’m used to. Most recently I have watched a family member decline in health and require more from us than we have to give, which in itself is a sad struggle.

All of this has required no small amount of adaptability and acceptance on my part, and I want my work over the coming years to interrogate that feeling of helplessness, but also the resilience those experiences have instilled in me. 

Over the past five months I have created the eight pieces that make up Inflorescence.

In my previous body of work, Invented Biology, I used my interests in biology and the environment as reference points for a series of monoprint collages.  My intention was for the viewer to feel as though they were looking through a microscope at a petri dish. The study of these compositions would reveal the relationships and impacts the elements had on each other. 

Inflorescence, then, was an evolution, a logical next step. I started it the summer after I found out I’d been accepted into the graduate program, and I was simply fired up to make some work and let my intuition drive the creative vehicle.

The work was my most colorful and exuberant yet.  Like Biology, it showcased my own imagined shapes and systems, as well as bursts of technicolor flowers. I freely explored color, and in the final two, experimented with cutting out the entire compositions, liberating them from the rectangles of the previously established configurations. I was hopeful and excited about a blossoming future and I think the work reflects that. 

I have always worked in cycles of generation, experimentation, and creation. I spend long days in the studio producing stacks of prints containing layers of watercolor and oil-based monoprints, collagraph, plexiglass intaglio, and trace monotype, as well as using handmade papers I’ve marbled, dyed, or bleach-painted. I take my prints to the studio and apply additional layers of gouache, pen and ink drawings, markers, colored pencil or other mixed media. When I sense that a print is ready, I begin my paper-cutting process and amass box-loads of “elements” I’ve excised from my prints and hoard them for future collaging. 

            The themes of collection and work for its own sake continue to resurface in my art. I consider patience a virtue and find joy creating work that puts that patience on display. I also derive satisfaction from making parts into a whole, or piecing things together to establish a completely new visual paradigm.