Artist’s Statement

Artist Statement

My creative practice explores intersections between visual and verbal language systems that shape and frame our perceptions and understandings. This investigation fuses traditions and assumptions of domestic still life and conceptual art across paintings, drawings, and letterpress prints. The work activates dialogues between word and image, seeing and reading, abstraction and representation, object and idea, refusing to accept these categories as fixed and mutually exclusive. I am interested in the unresolved spaces in between categories where multiple readings and identities co-exist. To investigate these spaces, I utilize the modernist grid, still life objects, contrasting painterly styles, and words that break apart into other words. I often work in series where chosen elements—still life objects, letters, and words—repeat and alter across pieces. Multiple iterations become catalysts for reinterpreting, renovating, and coaxing the familiar into unexpected places. This project posits reading as an active and collaborative process and where meaning is constructed from mixed, disparate components.

During this pandemic year, I began adding photography to my practice, first as an activity of distraction during the months of lock down, and later, I began developing photographic imagery to combine with the letterpress prints. This new combination of media has opened new channels of investigation and image construction.

I have been working on two bodies of work over the past year and a half: fractures and greenery. The first series, fractures, combines photographs I have taken of broken and reconstructed teacups with letterpress text arrangements. These pairings express both cultural collapse and the possibility of reimagining, of reconstructing a way forward using the wrecked shards left behind. The pieces are meditations on the creative process of breaking down and reassembling, examining subjects in formation.

The second series, greenery, places still life objects and stenciled foliage in lush, painterly environments. The objects and snippets of foliage are suspended in a nowhere, in between place. The superimposed texts are transitional phrases used to join clauses of sentences. These pieces join visual representations of nature and culture, arresting both in a frozen moment meant to evoke the suspension of pandemic lockdown and our collective inaction on climate change.