Artist Statement

My work begins from a question: what gives something the right to exist, and under what conditions is that existence withdrawn. I approach painting as a conditional environment, a bounded field in which nothing is granted by default. Form earns its place by being structurally supported, and I am interested in how an image reorganizes itself around what can be maintained. Across the work, certain forms recur. I treat them as working elements with their own agency rather than only as symbols to decode. Their meaning, partly, lies in what they do inside the image: holding space, shifting weight, creating tempo, introducing friction. Repetition is a method of testing and expanding this meaning.

I construct small arrangements of objects, choosing each one for its particular quality of presence. The model-building is a way of reencountering material: of handling and arranging it until the image can hold not just its appearance but the ways it is inhabited beyond its physical and psychological function. What I am trying to paint is the quality of encounter with an object. The image is a record of that encounter.

My practice draws on devotional image traditions, including emblem books, Pennsylvania Fraktur, theorem painting, and 18th & 19th-century textiles. These traditions encoded specific beliefs about community, devotion, and social order. I inherited those beliefs in complicated ways, shaped by questions of taste, propriety, and belonging. I also look to the Transcendental Painting Group for their commitment to structural rigor in service of something beyond representation. The structural logic I am rebuilding is inseparable from both inheritances. How to work in this vein without either reproducing it uncritically or keeping it at an ironic distance is one of the central questions in my practice.

What interests me about these traditions is their function as systems of knowledge. They were ways of organizing perception, encoding value, and transmitting understanding of how the world coheres developed largely by women in craft, largely outside sanctioned institutional contexts, and largely dismissed on those grounds. The structural rigor was a form of seriousness that did not require permission. Working within and against that inheritance is a form of insistence: that these ways of seeing were and remain epistemologically serious, and that painting is one place where that seriousness can be demonstrated rather than argued.