Statement

I make painted collages on aluminum, in addition to fiber and drawing-based installations that range in size from three feet high to room size immersive environments, exploring healing and resilience. I share my larger works in non-profit or academic venues and show my smaller wall-based works in gallery and community settings. 

My collaged works on shaped aluminum are layered drawings and paintings that form densely nested worlds of pattern. I start initially with drawing, often basing my images on medical or crime scene photography. The images explore the notion of the wound but then the layering of color and the fluidness of the ink mediums produce an organic overlay. I utilize this layering as a way of nature reclaiming and growing over the pain, producing a beautiful scar. 

With my fiber installation work, I became attracted to working with light, reflective, transparent fabrics because it reminds me of the permeable separation between the living and the dead. In my installations, I use a flat felled seam technique with transparent fabric. I combine these ephemeral materials with LED strip lighting, video, sound, and diffusion film. 

My work is situated in the work of the Pattern and Decoration movement, second wave feminist artists, the California Light and Space movement, and the rich alternative history of quilt making, and craft. In my work, I am driven to memorialize my mother whom I lost to alcoholism and domestic violence, and to help provide a healing space for people who face violence without recourse. I draw and sew as a journey towards wholeness, both for myself and for my mother’s memory. My work seeks to reclaim the female body and bear witness to the spirit by emphasizing the vibrancy of pattern and flow, the softness of the fabric and the ever-present lightness of both natural and LED light. Creating works of beauty in brokenness is my highest form of resistance.