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 and Age of Reason, spearheaded by European male theorists such as Descartes, who separated mind from body and declared the body a machine for work.
I continue the tradition of nude figurative painting 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.
Working within the epidemic of loneliness, as declared by the US Surgeon General in 2023, 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. The through-line is emphasizing the importance of time off
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. Like the Expressionists, I reject painting that attempts to replicate reality exactly and move toward intuitive mark-making. 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. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, traces how early capitalist modernity displaced communal and magical world-views with inert and mechanistic ones, a process mirrored in visual arts’ turn toward anatomically-correct naturalistic depiction. I am interested reviving a more free and gestural way of painting that mirrors the liberatory themes within my work. My brushwork becomes an assertion of freedom, resisting control in favor of openness and playfulness. In this sense, both the content and style of my paintings work together to imagine alternative ways of being.