My work explores artifacts as vehicles of human connectedness to specific sites and occurrences. Compelled by interactions with the land and landscape, I investigate the personal, environmental, and political significances of place. My maternal roots are in the North Georgia mountains, where my extended family were subsistence farmers, living closely with the land, three generations packed into a tin-roofed cabin. Through the upheaval of many relocations during my own childhood, revisiting the family land—equal parts mica-flecked red clay riverbanks and buckshot cars rusting in the woods—has been a constant.
A lineage of Appalachian matriarch quilters has filtered into my own often-fragmented artwork made up of collaged scraps, piecework, and castoffs, all stemming from a place of Painting—my disciplinary touchstone. Likewise, the resonance of the mountains coupled with the reverberations of my Catholic upbringing (via my paternal roots) have me channeling altars, relics, and mysticism while exploring elemental approaches to artmaking such as ceramics and stained glass.
Idiosyncratic, ephemeral contrasts catch my attention daily—human interventions in the natural world such as fluorescent surveyor’s markings, chunks of concrete and slag, plastic fragments and crushed cans along the curb in my current Rust Belt town outside of Detroit. As I’m walking or running, these signals and remnants glint, dissonant against their natural surroundings; I pocket them or snap a photo. Equal investment in essential materials—tarnishing silver leaf, foraged clay, and volcanic ash, for example, further activates the work, such as may occur with the aura of a beloved souvenir.
These artifacts and images integrate into my working palette. In the studio, their context is altered—they’re transmuted. Repetition creates an echoing dialog among paintings, works on paper, stained glass, and ceramic work; between the depicted and the displayed. Drawing upon inherited instincts—both familial and formal—I splice objects and imagery from natural and constructed environments (foam packing forms, safety-orange fences), with particular repeated elements (paver/stone shapes, scribbled lines), and glowing color. The resulting work spans disciplines—pivoting between realism and abstraction, the rendered and the embodied—contradictions palpable.
August, 2024