Here is my word salad about my relationship to art:
Beauty is oxygen to me. I need it to survive, to find my hope, to settle into mySelf.
There is nothing more calming to my nervous system than putting together the puzzle that is collage. I take wild and beautiful fragments—paper, canvas, photos, fabric, thread, color—and organize them into a balanced composition that invites you to feel joyful and connected and mirrored.
I like to make the implicit explicit—what is the framework at play that we feel but don’t see or talk about? What did we experience REALLY (and maybe it kind of sucked? but now it could be funny?)? There is relief to be felt when someone calls out our experience in a way that is pithy and maybe even uncomfortably earnest, but wholly true, and having it explicitly described makes us feel a little more steady in our reality.
My artwork plays with the concept of iteration. As a former copy editor, I find the concept of editing—working to make something more precise—to be a universal framework. I love precision, delighting in words, images, tastes, and so on that convey the essence of their intent. I appreciate that precision can be an iterative process—adding / shedding / reorganizing until a thing is “just so” takes time and practice, and sometimes you are in the weeds until the core of the thing becomes clear. I love to organize wild, mismatched pieces into something that makes you instinctively feel right.
I am reminded of how to find this visual equilibrium by looking at nature and the imperfect geometry found therein. In the repetition of an organic pattern, there is a wide range of extrapolation on any shape, yet all hang together in one gorgeous composition. This dovetails with my love for abstract art, with its paradoxical confined wildness, organized into something that makes you instinctively feel right. Like nature, abstract art can be wild and uneven, yet wholly cohesive.
I learned how to frame a shot and develop photos in the darkroom at the tender age of 6. I come from a long line of hobbyist photographers, whose well-composed, now-vintage images I have been reworking in myriad ways (as you will see if you wander around this here website). Additionally, I was a subscriber to World Magazine as a child and loved the abstract photos on the back—I am pleased when I take a close-up, abstracted photo of something and someone asks me, "What is that?"
