Statement
My practice mirrors the adaptive ecologies of the natural world. Through networks of text and image, I explore nature’s constant movement, change, and struggle for survival. Responding to landscapes negatively impacted by human activity, I use my work to address pollution, overproduction and waste.
I make works on paper, textiles and installations in which imaginary ecosystems grow and decay. My paintings on paper combine organic shapes and primitive marine life, floating among plastic packaging with lines and patterns to suggest biological systems and mental rhythms. In my installations, I develop the ideas from my drawings to take over a wall or an entire room.
Words appear throughout my work, including single emotional states stitched onto fabric, phrases from daily life painted onto paper, or fragments of thoughts applied with graphite on the wall. While my landscapes allude to the constant reshaping of our physical environment, the text I include creates a topography of the mind. Things people say, recurring thoughts and excerpts from the books I read reflect my internal landscape, becoming landmarks for psychological experiences. I play with font types, size and color, exploring typography as a tool of emotional expression.
When I cut paper to create my collaged drawings and installations, I am performing a controlled destruction that parallels nature’s deterioration by human activities. My stitching represents nature’s regenerative forces, reflecting how ecosystems renew themselves after being damaged. In my public art projects, I expand the ideas found in my drawings by incorporating text into an already existing environment. In one project, phrases placed on billboards created holes in a landscape taken over by advertising. In another project, I used language to refocus the attention of the passerby, inviting them to look through the fence of an empty lot, which nature had slowly begun to conquer.
My work magnifies the small, persistent marks we leave on the landscape and invites viewers to appreciate the beauty and fragility of the natural world. Together, these observations prompt us to question humanity’s fraught relationship with the environment and the impact we have on the land.