ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I’m a painter and mixed-media artist obsessed with abstract landscapes that evoke themes of longing, resilience and the multitudinous inner lives of women.

My work ranges from small gouache compositions in repurposed old books to large-scale mixed-media commissions layered with images and half-hidden words generated by my collaborators. I use a dynamic palette, organic shapes, and intuitive mark-making to create vivid compositions that pulse with quiet tension between what is revealed and what remains hidden. The frequency of loose, quasi-calligraphic handwriting in my work is a loving nod to my grandmother, a vivacious and creative woman who burned her poetry when she got married. Inscribing words directly into the landscape in my compositions feels like a form of incantation, summoning her writing back to life and tattooing it onto the earth itself. I also collaborate regularly with singers, performers, writers and activists, creating multi-disciplinary works that explore the complex joys, devastations and transformations of women’s and gender nonconforming people’s lives.

At its most essential, my art-making practice is my response to the pressures of living in an increasingly fragmented, polarized and de-sensitized world. It feels both urgent and—in my own quiet way—political to coax myself into internal states where I can live in the fullness of my contradictions and longings and astonishments, and every so often make glimpses of those internal states visible to other people. So many of the people I care about also seem to be at odds with this current moment, feeling like—for all its wonders and possibilities—the world we’ve created demands that we contort our inner lives in ways that are limiting, deadening, and at the very least unkind. When so many of us live in landscapes that are way too contracted for our wingspans, we need to remember that our imaginations belong to us, and that no matter what devastation the external world dishes out, we can envision spaces that are free enough to wrap us up while our bodies pulse and unclench for a minute or two and our hearts widen out again to their actual size. 

I believe that the work of world-changing is first and foremost an inside job. And I don’t think we can build a freer, more inclusive, more just society until we can actually let ourselves feel all those sensations inside our own skin and bones first. It’s difficult. At least it’s difficult for me. That’s why my work is full of imperfections—rough surfaces, scribbles, layers on layers. It’s important to me to keep a thread of mundanity and grit running through my images. For me, the daily search for what is luminous and expansive co-exists with what is heartbreaking and hard. I’m not escaping everyday life. Making art is not a psychedelic experience that rips me away from my chores. I’m still here with my sleeves rolled up and my feet planted in the now—but the there is palpable. I can hear it breathing. See flashes of it in the warp and weft.