Artist Statement
I work on the scale of the body. This encompasses the very large and the very small.
To begin, I would like to clarify what I mean by the term body. To me, the landscape is another body, and that body exists in relationship to my own. The painting, too, is another sort of body, that mediates the relationship between my body and the body that is the landscape.
The crux of this is that the landscape is vast and ultimately untouchable, and yet it is, at the same time, also a body which I shape through touch when I form a painting. For this reason, the scale of my relationship to landscape must be 1:1, because it is through the act of painting that I touch it.
To work on the scale of the body, then, means both using sweeping mark-making gestures that reflect the action of the body as we well as working minute details into the skin of the painting's surface.
I draw ideas for imagery from sources ranging from the cellular, constellations, plants, and human remains. These things all possess organic and systemic relationships within themselves and to each other. I combine these sources with compositional elements that derive from response to the material qualities of paint and surface, and from the memory of my body's response to the land-body. The paintings are therefore a marriage between seen and felt body to body relations.
The final moment of bodily realization occurs within the painting at the moment of installation. I have played a lot with different methods of installation, vacillating between panels adhered to heavy, solid cradles, and panels installed flush against the wall, as a sort of window or screen. These strategies emphasize different ways in which the painting's corporeality has the power to bring an outside element into space, and commingle that element as a sensory phenomenon in the room.
Once a painting is installed, I leave the body, and allow other bodies to enter.