Artist Statement

I want to devote time to working on the otherworldly. I see the magic in the mundane and I want to capture it. I imagine a garden in my mind and I want to build it. I think in fragments and I build in fragments. When my ideas and objects come together, they become visual poetry.

I explore the tension between dichotomies. Predator and prey, life and death, beauty and grotesque. Twisting, writhing snakes and bent swanned necks. Sharp beaks and soft feathers. Dripping green tulip stems and their soft, crumpled flowering bodies. A silver spider web and the visceral reality of that spider having eight legs. My work is drawn from personal mythology and universal symbology.

I push and pull because that’s all I’ve ever known. I have a small family and they can be distant. I am the last of a line and I am desperate to preserve those memories because someday soon, everyone I know will die. The only thing that tied us together was our mutual interest in the fox outside the kitchen window, a collection of turkey feathers in a ceramic vase, the crows eating pancakes on the back porch, or the deer who died alone one day, caught within the foundation of our house.

I was born, like many only children, with a profound sense of solitude. I mourned what hadn’t happened yet until it did and grief crumbled the teeth in my mouth like a bad dream. I don’t know what else to say except that it will also happen to you one day but at least we have that in common.