My multi-disciplinary work is the by-product of a deep engagement with nature and its particle-laden material matter. Through the uncommon employ of natural color, chosen for its specific visual attributes and potential to act alchemically as well as symbolically, I challenge and celebrate humanistic notions of abundance, void, gender, memory, emotion and perception.
My projects transform over long periods of time through a combination of fieldwork and ritualistic, experimental, painting, drawing and printing processes. Although seemingly abstract, much of the work derives from specific personal encounters that warrant my further investigation in the studio. Eventually the original catalyst becomes indistinguishable, giving way to metaphoric visual cues through palpable surface, form and material. Even though I often glean technical information from scientific, historic and cross-cultural research, I am not concerned with the direct or easily understood end-communication of intellectual, ethnocentric, or scientific data.
The work is successful when it elicits an emotional response, first and foremost, to me: the slow and thoughtful hard-to-please maker/seeker. Transcending my solitary angst/pleasure engagement with the work by welcoming a similar visceral response from a viewer, is a bonus. A work is resolved when it defies depiction yet materializes as a reductive yet uniquely complex, perceptual object: an emotive, surrogate for language with a visible, inner “land-made”, often elegant, aesthetical existence.
Sustaining a non-toxic studio practice, expanding arcane methodologies that have been perfected in ancient cultures for thousands of years, derived from the environment itself, is, in and of itself, cathartic. It is my best way to inwardly experience and outwardly suggest hope for a renewed future: one that values the importance of earth and climate care, human mindfulness, female agency and well-being.
My studio is both my lab and sanctuary.
Read Canvas Rebel interview here.