STATEMENT:
In 2014 I had brain surgery to remove a tumor that was pressing on my optic nerve. After it was removed, I experienced color differently in an intensive form. It was a true breakthrough in my emotional perception of the act of making art. That’s when I started painting.
Mixing and experimenting with different materials, such as spray paint, oil stick, bleach and found fabrics allows for a tension and spontaneity in how they react to one another; a push-pull in exploring the visceral in the painterly. In addition, I started working with clay to further my exploration of the brain as a three-dimensional abstract object. After my surgery, these gestural abstract compositions and ceramics shaped into my preferred visual vocabulary.
I explore queerness, nostalgia, and femininity as I disorient and disrupt through a combination of marks, textures, and material, referencing punk, Riot Grrrl culture, and the domestic. I use abstraction to examine the tension between material/emotion, and language/memory; juxtaposing rawness and order, soft and hard, structured and unrefined.
I create paintings through the relationship of seemingly unconnected fabrics full of memory and history that take on new identities and narratives in their combination. When I lay out pieces of a painting, some colors and marks navigate to the front while others fade quietly, allowing balances and tensions to feel accentuated. I’m pushing the materiality of painting through the use of sewing, fastening, and ceramics, allowing for the potential of an expanded form. Similar to my surgery, I take things apart and piece them back together, as as form of reclamation and healing searching for alternative expressions. There is an attitude of femme defiance, invoking resistance and rebirth in each piece.
My ceramic practice includes both hand building and clay piping. For the piping I blend down the clay into a consistency similar to cake frosting. I use this technique to create incredibly textured pieces that become vulnerable, intimate worlds of their own. I like juxtaposing the universally recognized cake piping as a social entrance into these guarded and unknown spaces, as if “by invitation only”. There is a taking back of these forms of domesticity- cake decoration, laces, bows, and ruffles- in a material that is also domestic at its’ root; a queering of the domestic.These larger ideas became a deeper calling for reclaiming my identity and balancing chaos and calm.
As I take in information art allows me to process it all, examining the tension between material and emotion, as well as participating in a visual disruption in order to communicate.
