My art explores archetypal forms as they arise in both dreams and waking states of consciousness. I draw on Jung’s theories of creativity and the collective unconscious to bring my interests in alchemy, feminism and modernism together. I came of age as an artist loving abstraction and expressionism and approach my work through a lens both critical of and nostalgic towards modernism. I want to challenge, wrestle with, and reconcile the modernist canon with a feminist perspective of intervention.
I am interested in challenging definitions of what is beautiful and ugly. Cultivating this dissonance, I create a conscious interplay between order and disorder, often combining subtle mark making with aggressively handled surfaces. In some of the works a formal compositional structure such as the diptych and multiple panels further disrupts harmony and creates a tension of opposites that contains these tensions in a serial, cinematic format.
The works’ expressive power is derived from the ambiguous nature of recognizable yet altered and pared down forms and the intense mark making. There are vestiges of the body and its gestures. The resulting effect is an emotional immediacy that is baroque in sensibility. Years of study of 16th and 17th century European painting and drawing have additionally informed my aesthetics.
At its root my work is direct and emotional. I cultivate both a poetic and visceral aesthetic. I often start with the transformative process of collage, tearing, cutting, and recombining materials into many physical layers that both bury and reveal their symbolic content. The collage process allows me to “mine” my previous work for new incarnations, thus being a synergistic and alchemic process. This is a not unlike a calling forth or a meditation. As collage breaks down and re-assembles images, I can discover deeper meanings that mirror the process of connecting with the unconscious. I distill the new shapes and forms, investigating and reworking them further. In mixing abstraction with anthropomorphic form, the images become sites of psychological archeology where meaning can both emerge and be extracted. The desired outcome is work that is charged with carrying both psychological and symbolic meaning.
I am interested in challenging definitions of what is beautiful and ugly. Cultivating this dissonance, I create a conscious interplay between order and disorder, often combining subtle mark making with aggressively handled surfaces. In some of the works a formal compositional structure such as the diptych and multiple panels further disrupts harmony and creates a tension of opposites that contains these tensions in a serial, cinematic format.
The works’ expressive power is derived from the ambiguous nature of recognizable yet altered and pared down forms and the intense mark making. There are vestiges of the body and its gestures. The resulting effect is an emotional immediacy that is baroque in sensibility. Years of study of 16th and 17th century European painting and drawing have additionally informed my aesthetics.
At its root my work is direct and emotional. I cultivate both a poetic and visceral aesthetic. I often start with the transformative process of collage, tearing, cutting, and recombining materials into many physical layers that both bury and reveal their symbolic content. The collage process allows me to “mine” my previous work for new incarnations, thus being a synergistic and alchemic process. This is a not unlike a calling forth or a meditation. As collage breaks down and re-assembles images, I can discover deeper meanings that mirror the process of connecting with the unconscious. I distill the new shapes and forms, investigating and reworking them further. In mixing abstraction with anthropomorphic form, the images become sites of psychological archeology where meaning can both emerge and be extracted. The desired outcome is work that is charged with carrying both psychological and symbolic meaning.
