My studio practice is a one-room schoolhouse where I play teacher, student, and researcher. The subjects range from algebra to poetry, archaeology to gardening, penmanship to social-emotional learning. Every painting is an interdisciplinary project that I design, complete, assess, and sometimes revise. Made of wood and acrylic paint, the works resemble chalkboard drawings, petri dishes, scrapbooks, worksheets, informational posters, and photographic prints that went wrong in the darkroom. They are marked by physical wear, especially the small pieces unable to hang on a wall. These are objects to be used and handled, like field samples, brochures, or show and tell artifacts.

Having grown up on farms, I am unable to shake frugality and resourcefulness. My studio accordingly operates as a cyclical ecosystem for gesso and paint, which I peel from my mixing cups and roll from my palms. When I finally get around to washing the brushes, I decant the water jars and dry the remaining sludge. Everything is catalogued into a loose system of baggies, containers, stacks, and clotheslines, transforming it into raw material again.

Most projects begin through playful experimentation with scrap. Cutting and tearing dried paint allows my conscious and unconscious preoccupations to emerge. Liberated by the indirectness of rearranging fragments, I can ferment ideas and questions within a nonlinear process.

Thoughts crystallize as I layer fresh and reclaimed paint onto panels. Like a sedimentary deposit, each piece is a record of unseeable events over time. Every brush stroke and bit of collage buries the forms to which it responds. Though I know I will sand the surface to expose some slice of this process, I can never fully predict what will remain visible. I have engineered my own lack of control, which provides me with stimulating memory tests and a liberating sense of abandon.

Gradually subjecting my paintings to increasingly fine grits of sandpaper, I erase much of their history in hopes of discovering unexpected occurrences and relationships. It feels like science. The complexity of the revealed imagery exceeds anything I could create through additive methods alone, and any beauty comes from collisions among intention, accident, and entropy. When I look back at my work, I see so much that I cannot claim. The ongoing lesson seems to be that, like my paintings, I myself am porous and unfixed.

~ May 2026

I want to give shape to my inner thought world—the stuff I can’t capture in words. Using color and gesture intuitively, I create dense, layered paintings through a multitude of experimental processes. Bits of recognizable imagery and text point to my preoccupations with childhood, femininity, spirituality, science, and education, while more abstract forms invite free association. Made on sturdy wooden supports, the surfaces and edges of these paintings reveal a history of deposition and erasure, rendering them objects as much as images.

My practice begins with remnants and fragments I collect with no end in mind: scraps of wood, dried-up chunks of gesso, trinkets, and trash, along with doodles, word lists, and photos of the ground taken during walks. Scavenging and salvaging are vital to my lifestyle, and these activities provide the raw material for my creative practice. In the additive stage of putting paint to a surface, I see myself collaborating with chance and entropy, welcoming in whatever captures my attention.

Such openness entails overwhelming accumulation. I have to find ways to recover the most important forms that have been buried, which I do through physical excavation like scraping, sanding, and polishing. All done by hand, this careful but extensive labor becomes another opportunity for discovery, yielding cross sections reminiscent of geological, biological, and archaeological samples. Such specimens do serve as sources of inspiration, but also point to the ways in which my process affects my body: the compression and abrasion of materials wear on my skin, ligaments, and bones.

Though the wounds and aches force me to attend to my age and present condition, my practice helps me rekindle a youthful sense of creativity. The accrual and removal of layers mirrors the nonlinear process of personal growth, in which unlearning is just as important as learning, and healing means bearing scars.

~ Spring 2024