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My work begins from a question: what gives something the right to exist, and under what conditions is that existence withdrawn.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 rather than symbols to decode. Their meaning lies in what they do inside the image: holding space, shifting weight, creating tempo, introducing friction. Repetition is a method of testing. If a painting closes too easily, I reopen it or abandon it.

My practice draws on folk, autodidactic, and devotional image traditions, including emblem books, Pennsylvania Fraktur, and medieval 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 with it honestly, without either reproducing it uncritically or keeping it at an ironic distance, is one of the central questions in my practice. Liberation is not the absence of structure, but the creation of conditions in which something living can take root and persist.