Artist Statement

Artist Statement

The act of remembering is a layered sensory experience rarely wed to a linear, chronological narrative. I recall an emotion connected with a particular corner, the quality of light, warmth or coolness in a space, or the sense of enclosure or exposure of a room. In the complexity of my interior remembered space I see the dominant color in a tablecloth or am brought suddenly to the long ago smell of a friend’s house. The world made up of these fragments and traces is the one I hope to inhabit in my work.

Graduate Thesis

Collage: Building a World

Excerpt

I entered graduate school as a still life painter, but my first collage blew open my artistic practice. The process of collage seemed to align with my own way of thinking and living in such a strong way that I felt I had artistically come home. The work of bringing diverse fragments or pieces together—people at a party, ingredients in a salad, or songs on a playlist—seemed so natural to me that going to my studio began to feel like a real continuation of my life for the first time. This groundwork allowed me to expand into my current practice, which embraces physical construction of models, photography, and word drawing as well as painting and collage.

Although much of my current work is not collage in material terms, the sensibility remains the same. The process itself has become a metaphor for everything I do in the studio; words become a collage element, as do pieces of cardboard and wire, wood and glue. The space of the studio plays its own part, coming in and out of my work as another collage component.

Plain View
Plain View