My work is process driven and generative. I enjoy pushing pattern and layering to the limits, creating multi-layered and visually abundant works on paper and artists books. I am a printmaker by training but most of my work is made with mixed media. Working with mixed media allows me to create richly layered surfaces that reflect printmaking theory and technique but utilize paint, drawing materials and collage, as well as printmaking processes such as silkscreen, relief printing and letterpress. I enjoy the focused practice of creating intricately hand cut paper and repetitive patterning using paint and drawing materials as well as the digital/analogue relationship involved with printmaking. Central to the aesthetics of my work is the haptic quality of layered materials and technique that manifest as I strive to intertwine figures and environment.
When making my work, I consider what it feels like to be in a female body, the boundaries of my body against other bodies and my surroundings. As part of my practice I am attempting to reclaim sensuality and sexuality as a mother living under hetero-patriarchal capitalism. I see the struggles of women as intertwined with the struggle to end extractive and destructive practices that harm the earth and all living things. In life and art I seek ways to center healing from these harms and explore the desire to nurture the self and others as a source of power. This land-body entanglement is something I continue to learn about and explore through my work.
Through the collage process, I cut into the body, making incisions and extractions, and then I go back and fill the voids of these violent incisions. Making the body anew, enmeshing them into their world, and building abundance back into the body.
I use a lot of pattern as well, exploring pattern as abundance, and exploring the body as a site of action, including the radical acts of finding ease, rest and pleasure, countering the idea that these things are somehow frivolous, excessive and unproductive.
Pattern has been a way of accumulating mass, making something big out of something small. Generating abundance in a world of manufactured scarcity. By covering the surface in pattern, I am emphasizing the interconnectedness of all things and attempting to create transformation through repetition in which the body(ies) and environment become one. Through this process, I explore building abundance within the body as a representation of joy, pleasure, and sensuality.
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