Art Educator
I’m interested in painting a body that harbors a whole life. Painting has a rich history of an artist observing a person for an extended period of time and capturing that individual on canvas. For me, painting is about the intimate space that comes from looking intensely for an extended period of time. This process illuminates physical complexities that make up who we are and can also indicate emotional states or life stories. Painting from life is critical to my practice because my exploration of identity is rooted in the connection I seek to have with my sitter (even if the sitter is myself). It is through moments of connection that identity can be formed.
When we negotiate the space between us, become aware of our bodies in the presence of each other, and begin to question what our positions, posturing, and expressions are communicating; we become aware of ourselves as subjects with identities. Performance is also an important part of my practice; I have grappled with whether there is a “true” self to be revealed or whether selves are produced in a moment, in a particular context, or in a relationship. When I paint a portrait, am I seeking to understand my sitter’s true identity or am I capturing their identity as it is produced at the moment of our interaction? These are places where identity is unstable, and thus most malleable. When observing a sitter, I’m looking for those points of entry, and somehow communicating that on canvas, paper or video, to a viewer, who finds the same point of entry into themselves.
While my Bachelor of Fine Arts was a painting concentration, I have experience in diverse media including ceramics, sewing, printmaking, video installation, weaving, and drawing. I love learning with new materials and regularly pursue workshops and experiences that expose me to new ways of making; most recently I have taken a continuing education drawing course through the School of Visual Arts in summer 2020. Below are samples of my experiences with different media.
This recent series was developed in a continuing education course in Summer, 2020. The series, titled "Let Me Collect Myself", is ongoing. All pieces are 11"x14" mechanical pencil on paper. My current artist statement for the series is below :
This series is both research and documentation of a grieving process. I’ve chosen to use self-portraiture to express and document the often conflicting ways I’m processing my father's recent death because drawing requires that I see myself slowly, sometimes in pieces, and also because it centers my body’s physiological response to trauma.
Research indicates that trauma often prompts a “crisis in identity”. Neurologically, midline structures in the brain decrease in activity; these structures are responsible for sensing internal states and processing personal connections to incoming information. This decreased function impairs self-awareness and dulls one’s relationship to one’s own inner reality. Seeing myself through the slow process of drawing myself is self-affirming, requires physical experiencing, and provides imaginative representation of my inner reality.