Using cultural cues and collected ephemera absorbed from my world, I create paintings that are process driven and that collaborate with chance. By combining a high-keyed color palette, expressive gesture, and symbolic mark-making, my multi-layered work is grounded in the informality of the unstructured painterly mark and the unadulterated visual language of graphic form. The result is the abstracted visualizations of my memories, emotions, and varied perspectives. 

In my thesis paintings below, I am commenting on the gendered binary between craft and high art by inserting objects (such as clothes pins, buttons, and sewing patterns) directly into the picture plane. Some of these objects symbolically represent what has traditionally been thought of as “women’s work” (much of which remains socially invisible and culturally undervalued), and they allude to the relationship I have with the concept of the feminine in art and my desire to assign it a more highly valued cultural currency. While these familiar objects can evoke both a sense of comfort and nostalgia, their unlikely presentation challenges the viewer to reconsider them from another perspective—by turning craft into art.

Meander and Flow: Diptych, 2020. Acrylic, collage, Flashe, found objects, plaster, Stabilo pencil on canvas, 8’ x 6’.

Detail photographs from Meander and Flow: Diptych, 2020. Embedded objects, collage, chroma, texture, and mark-making elements. From left: angel, buttons, miniature clothes pins, pattern/texture, key, stamp, safety pin, sewing pattern, text, and miniature kitchen whisk.