Work Statement
I work at the intersection of painting, drawing, collage, photography, and sculpture to explore and shift the meanings of bodies and their interactions. I build images using visual markers of skin, plants, bones, fur, hair, the land, and the sky to think through ideas about gender and the ecology of living things. My work depicts entangled arms, legs, and other limbs. It is unclear if the figures are dancing, wrestling, embracing, or tearing away.
I utilize tactile and fluid processes, especially camera-less alternative photography such as the photogram because it resembles what it represents. The photogram also functions like an index, as it contains the residue or evidence of the original thing. Yet, the figures in photogram form lack detail, rendering them ethereal and ghostly; they are spirit and body simultaneously. After I expose a print, I build the image by compositing physical collage elements. Collage serves as an instrument of reconfiguration and caries and inherent quality of dynamic movement and disruption.
The body parts of women appear trapped within the confines of each composition. Held in a cocoon-like state, they reference ways in which people arrange themselves physically in response to social expectations as they struggle toward freedom of movement. This led to further exploration of how humans interface with other animals and the environment, and the systems of domination present. I employ human/plant/animal hybrids to think about what it would be like to experience another creature's subjectivity. The amalgamations are caught in a phase of metamorphosis, they are not yet what they will be, and they are no longer what they were before. Imagining them liberates monstrous figures who dissolve in and out of the landscape while thrashing around in violent transformation. Despite the bodies generating a site of contention as they pass through a transitional space, connections across lines of difference emerge, and communion between beings is synthesized.