Artist Statement

I make dense oil paintings that take folk and devotional image traditions seriously.

I paint from traditions that treated a picture as something that acts: emblem books, Pennsylvania Fraktur, theorem painting, 18th- and 19th-century textiles. In these, an image was made to be read, and trusted to bless, protect, or stand in for what was absent. The motifs I paint work that way, too.

I build my images before I paint them, making small models or arrangements of objects, choosing each for the way it holds presence, and lighting them until the scene feels inhabited. What I'm after is the feeling of encountering a thing.

These traditions matter to me as systems of knowledge. They were ways of organizing how people saw the world and what they valued, developed largely by women, in craft, outside official art institutions, and dismissed for exactly that reason.

I work inside that inheritance and against it, to insist that these ways of seeing were and still are valuable, and that painting is one place to show it.