Artist Statement

I work with recurring symbolic forms—birds, hands, vessels, trees—figures that echo across religious iconography, folk traditions, and vernacular art. These forms have survived not because they are stable, but because they are malleable. Their meanings stretch across time and culture, absorbing contradictions. I approach them not as relics to be preserved, but as generative materials—fragments of a visual language that continues to evolve.

Living between cultures has drawn me toward allegorical imagery: the way meaning migrates across borders through proverbs, devotional objects, or ornamental motifs. I’m interested in slippage—how a phrase like “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” mutates as it crosses languages and landscapes. What happens when a symbol unravels, loses its clarity, and reconstitutes itself in a different form? My practice dwells in that instability—where inherited symbols dissolve and reemerge as abstraction.

I am shaped by traditions that live between the sacred and the everyday—Books of Hours, Pennsylvania Fraktur, American and European folk art, medieval textiles, Transcendentalist painting. These are not merely visual references but ways of constructing meaning: ornamental systems, devotional gestures, embodied time. I look closely at how repetition can act as ritual, how decoration can be a form of resistance, how the handmade holds memory and presence.

In the studio, I work between clarity and distortion. Some pieces come together with quiet logic, while others resist, unravel, and demand to be rebuilt. That tension—between order and disorder, tradition and reinvention—is where the work lives. My paintings increasingly move toward abstraction: shapes fracture and fold, motifs fragment, and structure gives way to rhythm. Some retain a trace of the original image; others speak only through pattern, gesture, or chromatic logic. The process is intuitive but deliberate—a negotiation between reverence and rupture.

At its core, my work explores how the past persists—not as something fixed, but as something active, unstable, and alive because in art, we have the privilege of abandoning time. Abstraction, for me, is not a departure from meaning but a way of holding contradiction. I’m interested in what happens when symbols fall apart and return—speaking in unfamiliar forms, asking to be seen again.