Artist Statement
My practice emerges from an animist worldview. I see earth as autonomous and alive and every being as conscious and interconnected. Animist world-views were largely erased during the Age of Reason and Scientific Revolution, spearheaded by European male theorists who separated mind from body and declared earth inanimate. Over the past several centuries, Western civilization has embedded a narrative that separates humanity from the rest of life on earth. Underneath this dualistic logic, a truth of oneness lies buried. Through the integration of spirit and matter, and of animal, vegetal and mountainous bodies, I counteract this logic of separateness. "Self-portrait" shows me in my next life as a bird, while figures emerge from the land in “risen from clay" and “earth body". Playing with parallel patterns and processes that show up in both humans and plants, animals, landscapes and the cosmos, I paint pubic hair that grows like wild ‘weeds’ and veins that merge with underground root systems. The wisdom of other beings create meaning: the cicada shedding its exoskeleton and the resurrection fern turning green again after a long rain both symbolize rebirth, letting go, and starting over. Vultures, known to decompose dead bodies, represent new beginnings and the ever turning cycles of life and death. The imagery and visual language in my art practice helps to heal the learned division in my psyche and reintegrate humans with all of 'nature'.
Working within an epidemic of loneliness, my paintings focus on moments of intimacy, love, and collective joy. Pulling from both memory and imagination, I paint myself and friends enjoying our precious time off work, sunbathing and surrounded by greenery. Because so much of modern Western life revolves around measuring time, productivity, and looking at screens, the moments captured in my paintings become sacred.
My work is in dialogue with historical depictions of leisure by painters such as Cézanne, Seurat, and Pissarro, yet it resists the male gaze. I continue the tradition of 'the nude', 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. In my paintings, flora and fauna often engulf the human figures, emphasizing our insignificance and reliance on the world around us.
Conceptually, I see artmaking as alchemy—a way of filtering the external through our emotional-spiritual-physical bodies to transmute new realities. Formally, my work draws upon Expressionism’s focus on immediacy, subjective experience, and the emotional/spiritual. I reject both the sort of painting that attempts to replicate physical reality and 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 and perfectionism, 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 obsession with accurate mimesis emerged from Renaissance perspective, Enlightenment-era empiricism, and a broader cultural shift toward rationality, control, and individualism.