ARTIST STATEMENT

 

​The sun slings itself across the white wall like a martyred yellow beast, and in its light the dust is made holy. Most would call the space a room, but it is a world. It is a colloidal sea of microscopic lives and familial histories, swirling in the draft from the door. I know that in between the particles of air there is a wildness that never sleeps.  It is life's potential.  

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I am a wife, a mother, a coworker, and a person who plays at craft, who pretends in visual imagery.  And this is where I live.  Sparking.

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I have no tales of great wars or the conquering of peaks. My battles are fought in the shift of a shadow or decisions in minutia. My adventures are charted in the transition from a cold gray to a living green.  And I do not apologize for that.

 

There are days when the fog rolls in from the soul’s coast without a word of warning, more days than I'd like to admit. And so, I paint. I build layers of pigment like piling stones against a rising tide.  And that act punctures the murk.

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There, I work to map the wild that breathes inside, wringing from anxiety a sanctuary.

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There, phantom images emerge, dissolve, and re-form.  Sensations, recollection, and material response unfold in real time.  What results is an image that resists completion, hovering between what is seen, remembered and intuited.  The places that surface are unstable and indeterminate, echoes perpetually in the process of becoming.

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I've lived a life straddled between two worlds - the rugged reality of survival and the polished, insulated veneer of the middle class. I'd like to think my work is fueled by this class straddling.

 

Born into the visceral reality of trailer parks and Section 8 housing, I learned early that safety was a luxury and self-reliance was the only true currency. I believe that the "Hidden Curriculum" of society - the unspoken codes and status markers that define belonging, and the profound disconnection felt by those of us who've somehow entered the room but crawled to get there is where my art ultimately comes from. 

 

As a visual artist, I create non-objective abstractions that serve as a bridge between these two states of being. The textures and layers in my work created through acrylic, pastel, and digital mediums reflect a "Split Consciousness." There is the ruggedness of my upbringing: the stitches, the survival, and the sanctuary found in the untamed woods. And there is the structural formality of my professional life: the grids, the corporate standards, and the "organized" safety of suburban neighborhoods.  

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I am interested in the tension between the utility of the working class and the symbolism of the elite. While others may see art as a performance of refinement, I view it as a site of honesty. My abstractions do not seek to fit in; they seek to observe. They are the eyes of a "spy" within the middle class, documenting the self-righteousness and insulation of those who have never had to escape into the woods to find themselves.  

 

Ultimately, my art is a rejection of the "mask." It is an invitation to look past the curated facades of wealth and status to find the resilient, scarred, and deeply capable human experience beneath. I create for those who feel the same annoyance with the superficial and the same longing for the authentic - those who, like me, are separate from the poor and yet remain fundamentally "other" among the comfortable.  

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