Artist Statement

I am a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher excavating cultural and physical palimpsests through expressive art-making. 

Working across painting, weaving, installation, video art, and performance, my practice presents traces of history that survive physical and cultural transformations, dealing with everything from ancient stone statues of mythological figures to the way mold breaks down rotting lemons. I try to evoke ephemeral sensations and abstract concepts: layers of memory, the materiality of time, the way things transform as they age. I am drawn to metaphorical research, and enjoy rendering the textures of things that disintegrate, crumble, decompose, rust, fade. My experience of queerness and an interest in wild magic often inform my choices in the studio.

Recently, this work took a highly personal turn, as I created a show based around the recent wildfires in LA, which destroyed my childhood home and hometown. My art practice provided a safe space through which to begin to process that very real confrontation with physical transformation on an enormous and devastating scale. Visiting the site of my former home, time collapsed, and the familiar became estranged and seemingly ancient: an archaeological dig site. My studio practice allowed me to engage with this heavy emotional material. 

Wide-ranging literary and metaphysical research informs my process. At times, I take my microscope to the museum or the garden, and capture images of scales, feathers, leaves, which then become woven works. At other times, a particular combination of poetic or philosophical concepts and sensations demands to be investigated through the paintbrush, and I revel in the challenge of seeking the right material to precisely convey the meaning as I understand it; or reveal the latent pulse of an idea through material expression. Drawn from mythological and literary research as well as ecological processes such as wild fermentation and rhizomatic growth, my work investigates time and transformation.

I like to work on series, through which I can cast my net widely and haul in various forms of research ‘ephemera’ that then influence my practice. Sensory impressions of the ephemeral present are key, through looking and mark-making, I engage in a phenomenological relationship with my personal collection of object artifacts. The work is intuitive, and full of sacred secrets; I create using both ritual repetitions and spontaneous textural movements.