Artist Statement

I work with symbolic forms drawn from earthly matter—raindrops, blossoms, animals, stones, vines, pearls—objects encountered by humans across time and terrain. My practice engages with a symbolic logic in which such forms are understood as vehicles for invisible principles. This framework, present across religious and philosophical traditions, treats natural imagery not as decoration but as a means of signifying both material vitality and immaterial order. I draw on this symbolic inheritance to construct layered compositions where figures and motifs operate as fragments of a larger cosmological system.

Rather than treating imagery as closed or illustrative, I approach it as a constellation of signs, each one pointing beyond itself. This positions my work within a broader discourse on representation, where visible forms act as mediators of the invisible. By working with historical vocabularies such as fraktur, folk ornament, and medieval devotional painting, I underscore the persistence of symbolic translation across cultural contexts while re-situating these systems in a contemporary register that questions how meaning is produced, transmitted, and reframed in visual culture.

In the studio, I move 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. Increasingly my paintings 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 color. For me, abstraction is not a departure from meaning but a way of holding contradiction. I am interested in what happens when symbols fall apart and return, speaking in unfamiliar forms and asking to be seen again.

At its core, my work explores how the past persists, not as something fixed but as something unstable and alive. In 2025, I see symbolic translation as a way of addressing how meaning migrates in an era of ecological precarity, cultural displacement, and rapid image circulation. The forms I work with—whether blossoms, stones, or raindrops—carry both fragility and resilience, and their reappearance across time speaks to a human need to anchor ourselves in shifting conditions. By engaging these symbols, I ask how visual languages might adapt to a world where continuity is uncertain, and how abstraction can hold contradictions that mirror our current political and ecological moment.

My current interest lies in deepening this inquiry, testing how inherited vocabularies can be dismantled, reassembled, and reimagined in dialogue with a contemporary context. I want to push my practice further into this tension—between tradition and reinvention, legibility and dissolution—and to situate that exploration among my community, where we collectively create how meaning is made.