Artist Statement
My practice emerges from an animist worldview, one that perceives all forms of life as interconnected and emerging from the same origin. Magical world-views were largely erased during the Enlightenment era's Age of Reason, spearheaded by European male theorists such as Descartes, who separated mind from body and declared the body a mere machine for work. My painting is an act of world building–a way of weaving together simultaneous realities of feminist utopia and patriarchal dystopia.
Working within the epidemic of loneliness, my paintings focus on moments of collective joy. Pulling from both memory and fantasy, I paint myself and friends lying around in the sun, enjoying time off work, surrounded by greenery. My work is in dialogue with historical depictions of leisure by painters such as Cézanne, Seurat, and Pissarro, yet it resists the male gaze embedded in those works. I continue the tradition of nude figurative painting, but through an ecofeminist lens, reclaiming the body not as object to be dominated, but as an autonomous, living soul within an interdependent web of life and consciousness. This perspective aligns with ecofeminist philosophies that critique extractive hierarchies and instead emphasize care, reciprocity, and regeneration. I’m drawn to Donna Haraway’s definition of "oddkin," which calls for solidarity across species and creating alternative, queered family structures. This idea of oddkinship expands beyond the human, inviting plants, animals, and ecosystems into a shared field of intimacy and reciprocity which shows up in my work in the form of local flora and fauna that engulfs the figures.
Conceptually, I see image-making as an act of listening and alchemy—a way of filtering the external through our emotional bodies to transmute new realities. Formally, my work draws upon Expressionism’s focus on immediacy, subjective experience, and the emotional or spiritual. I reject both the sort of painting that attempts to replicate reality and the painting that claims to only be about itself. I am interested in a free, intuitive, and gestural painting–that mirrors the liberatory themes in my work. My brushwork becomes an assertion of this freedom—resisting control, discipline, trends, and elitism, in favor of embodiment and possibility. In this sense, both the content and style of my paintings work together to imagine alternative ways of being: playful, embodied, and interconnected. The Western canon’s emphasis on accurate mimesis emerged from Renaissance perspective, Enlightenment-era empiricism, and a broader cultural shift toward rationality, control, and individualism.