Artist Statement 

My work explores the dimensional and tactile nature of painting, and often references artists who have pushed this medium beyond the traditional picture-plane, including Sam Gilliam, Donna Nelson, Annie Albers, Laura Owens, and Mark Bradford among many others.

My process begins with pooling paints onto multiple layers of raw canvas stretched flat to large-scale tables. I use my body weight, gravity, and time to make the paint seep through the canvases, and allow them to stick together as they dry. I peel them apart, flip them over, working both sides of the canvas, and repeat this over many weeks. This intensely physical process infuses the paintings with a sense of history, grit, and grunge—an important central theme throughout my work.

Some canvases are complete at this point, while others continue to morph as I draw, paint, tear, weave, sew, staple, tape, and collage them. At times, I expose the stretcher bars and wrap them with torn strips of painted canvas as a way to declare that the entire structure is a painting, while also referencing ideas of restraint, repair, skeletal systems, and skin. I’ve been thinking a lot about “women's work” and motherhood in these pieces, and alluding to blankets, bellies, wrinkles, leathery skin, sagginess, hairstyles, gravity, decay, and things falling apart.

The grid is another recurring element that speaks to ongoing personal and societal battles to balance order and chaos, as well as commentary on the pixelation of our social lives and the natural world. I mostly work large-scale, using my entire body, and physically immerse myself in the materials. I am interested in how scale and the edges of the canvas can be access points for micro-moments to reveal more of the painter behind the painting. I am drawn to supersaturated, dramatic colors that provoke ideas about being “too much”—a label women are often given—and to conjure nostalgic feelings of fearlessness, freedom, and play.