My work is about relationships, and the complexity of closeness- the desire to separate from your past and return to it in the same breath. Across a wide ranging multidisciplinary practice, I explore how the repetition of deeply iconographic imagery and motifs reflect recurring, intrusive thought patterns and an inability to move past emotional trauma.
As a medium based in creation of the multiple, print becomes a method for creating structure. This framework, indulging a desire for order, creates space for disruption. Tedious handwork is an anxiety response, reflecting an obsessive desire for control, which is undone through woundings within the work. In a world of instant gratification, the act of sitting with heavy thoughts and repetitive processes for an extended time becomes a statement in itself, bringing that act to the content and context of the work.
This work is about the people who should be in the room, and are not there. It is about the presence of absence. A meditation on grief, the passage of time, the fleeting nature of joy, and the struggle to hold contradictory feelings simultaneously. It is about anxiety and the lack of control, the stiff upper lip and carrying on regardless.
Printmaking is the backbone of my practice. I am investigating how print functions beyond the confines of the edition. I inhabit a space between immersive, site-specific installation and a traditional understanding of individual pieces in a gallery setting. Each piece is a statement within a larger conversation, isolating an aspect of the dialogue, examining it, and placing it within the context of other work in the space.
I believe that process imbues meaning, strengthening concepts within the work. How a thing is made is a vital and evocative aspect of the resulting object. I am examining generational trauma, familial relationships, cognitive dissonance, memory, longing, the feminine, anxiety, emotional trauma, grief, loss, intrusive thought, and psychological scarring. My work is personal, raw, evocative, deeply iconographic and metaphorical. These concepts, conveyed through narrative iconography and textual information, are amplified through the choice of mediums and materials used to create my objects. For example, using hand embroidery brings connotations of extensive time and labor, hyperfocus and monotonous repetition. The process alludes to mending and suturing while recentering a medium innately connected to “women’s work” and often dismissed as decorative. Physically, the process of making countless small stitches mimics an anxiety tic, while also being a tally mark- a numbering that is both an accumulation and a countdown.
I use prints as modular components, allowing the work to inherit visual information across pieces. Within an installation, print allows me to manufacture sculptural components and wallpapers that build an immersive and contemplative space. Printmaking functions as a bridge between media to unify the work. A relief block printed onto paper is collaged into the background of paintings such as “And See What Remains” while the same block is printed onto the textile soft sculptures hanging within the space. The repeating print pattern unifies the painting and the sculpture, reinforcing that they are complementary examinations of a unifying question.
Each piece builds on the body of work, connecting and referencing other pieces to create a network of callbacks and reinterpretations. I use the collagist’s mindset of selecting, layering, and contrasting elements, continually breaking down and reconstructing earlier works while simultaneously examining questions in multiple pieces and different mediums. This comes to full realization when I install an exhibition. Treating each individual piece as an element in the larger composition of the installation, I layer the space until the individual works are microcosms of a larger story. Highly sustained attention to detail across the full scale of each work and the exhibition space at large is evidence of careful consideration and deliberate action to build an intentional space that rewards repeated viewing and engagement.