ABOUT THE WORK

Artist Statement

Art has potential to change and affect people in unforeseen ways.  As an artist, I hope to make work that is cogent, that speaks to both the personal and the universal, and that has the latent ability to influence others.  The development and language of a work of art; how materials are used, the use of color, form, and subject matter all contribute to its capacity to communicate. 

It is the position of the artist to attack formally, or provide answers to questions in the context of a living, breathing, changing culture.  Art serves as a means of overriding the poverty of our responses to the world, as mediation between cynicism and activism, indifference and wonder, impotence and self-empowerment.  Art reveals its power and provides a means to interpret what we see.  Therefore, it is the artist’s job to inform, to touch and to examine.

As a female artist, I have found my voice to be a minority in the face of a barrage of images of the mainstream media.  The visual representations of women in our culture are of particular interest to me.  In general, my figurative work attempts to counterbalance this barrage through speaking to the concept of the body as a spiritual and sensual force.  In most of my work, I use the figure to convey a sense of self-empowerment and assertion. I wish to suggest the existence of the psyche as a presence.  It is my hope that the viewer will be faced with the limitations of viewing the body as merely an object to be manipulated, desired or objectified.  I try to challenge the viewer to go beyond this interpretation and consider the temporality of existence and regard the body as both a vessel and a spiritual manifestation.

Geography of Memory

My most recent work focuses on the memories and experiences of my childhood. My paintings depict a geography of the past: family, the symbols and objects of my childhood home, and the familiar places and spaces I knew. I examine the intricacies, the layers of emotion, sadness, loss, joy and connection, that shape who I am as a person. Though these works are specific to a place and time, I hope they communicate the agency of memory in every person's life. My work asks the questions - "What is it that we recollect?" and "How do we experience the past through the lens of the present?"

The pieces started with direct reinterpretations of family photographs. Using the media of paint and encaustic to explore and expand on what I saw, I transformed the image using color, perspective, texture and proportion. Feeling limited by the static quality of a single photo, I felt the need to go further with my ideas, and began taking images from disparate sources and juxtaposing them into one painting. The space in and around the figures and objects became more abstract, and the relationship between figure and ground changed significantly. The intangible, open space in itself began to address some of the psychological aspects of memory.

These later paintings reveal unexpected relationships between distinct images, objects, and figures. They consider how these are each connected to or disconnected from the other, and how, then, this mirrors our own emotions and experience of the past. The process itself speaks to how we shape or distort the past through our memory.

Many of us experience loss or displacement in our lives. When we are young, that place we first discover as home looms large. We feel it will never change, and yet change it does. It is my desire as an artist to reflect some of my personal experiences in order to encompass the larger ideas of home, childhood, and memory.

Joyce Carol Oates, in her novel "We Were the Mulvaneys," explores the essential irony that those who are closest to us have the potential to wound or heal us in the most profound way:

"What is family after all except memories? - haphazard and precious as the contents of a catchall drawer in the kitchen?".... "But this document isn't a confession. Not at all. I've come to think of it as a family album. The kind my Mom never kept, absolute truth telling. The kind no one's mom keeps. But if you've been a child in any family you've been keeping such an album in memory and conjecture and yearning and it's a life's work, it may be the great and only work of your life."