Artist Statement

Artist Statement


“In my films, I always wanted to make people see deeply. I don’t want to show things, but to give people the desire to see.”
Agnes Varda

The work I do is informed by just this goal: to foster a desire to see. Art gives us a place to reckon with ourselves and our relationship to the world. Art, for me, is in the service of an invitation to experience something both familiar and strange, both known and mysterious. I aim to embrace the tenacity and fragility of life. My aesthetic is rooted in the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. This view of art honors temporality, spontaneity, imperfection, and the bittersweet and fluid nature of memory. I want people to feel they’ve discovered something they’d lost. And I want viewers to lose something, perhaps an idea of themselves or how things need to be, and to be surprised.

Toward that end, I work with loose, organic shapes and lines drawn from landscape and the natural world. My art practice is highly experimental: I use markmaking with a variety of mediums, castoff kitchen implements, found objects, construction, and packing materials to create texture and nuance. I build slowly using many layers. A love for color is the beginning and the end point, always.

As an artist, I’m interested in revelation and concealment, and in the responsorial of rhythm and gesture. My process is highly intuitive and influenced by the congenital visual impairment that is my great teacher. What I lack in visual acuity is augmented by a wide apprehension of subtlety in color and movement. And, thus, I’m keenly aware that each of us sees a little differently. Speaking from that uniqueness transcends the barriers set by our lesser selves. It makes room for and invites what’s best in us.

As a poet, I respond to the rich weave of thematic material we all face as human beings. Our lives are public and private at the same time; our time is both political and solitary. Poems, while they may draw from my lived experience, are not autobiography: emotional truth is what I aspire to and that shouldn't be mistaken for factual truth. Artists are magpies, after all. We steal, imitate, mutate, recreate seen or felt experience in service to a higher goal.

While my work is not overtly political, speaking an individual truth is always a political act in that artists can't be controlled by a message. Neither can you, the receiver, be controlled in what you make of art. Our cultural currency relies on a kind of collective shorthand where we assume we’re seeing and saying the same things. I’m interested in shaking that up. I’m interested in expanding and deepening what is seen, what is felt, what meanings we make of our brief, beautiful, and terrifying lives.