Artist Statement

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I am a visual artist working in painting, drawing, printmaking, and clay. For me, art has always been a way of giving form to what is felt before it is spoken, of making the interior visible. I believe that form itself is symbolic, that it carries meaning not by describing feeling but by embodying it. A line holds emotion in its weight and gesture; value and color shape how a passage is read and felt, the warmth or coolness of a hue, the charge between light and dark. My work lives at the meeting place of mind and body, using figuration to reveal the emotional undercurrents of experience, and drawing on the fluid, dreamlike logic of watercolor and line to let one state dissolve into another. The form, often a figure or a landscape, is not a container for the feeling; it is the feeling, made visible.

 

At the heart of my work are our relationships: to ourselves, to one another, and to what we live through. I am drawn to the pull within them, toward connection, toward love, and toward rising beyond what is hard. Across three decades my work has returned to the great human passages, grief, mortality, illness, the challenges of caregiving, and repair, and the narratives they hold. I have made work in the wake of losing my parents, imagining my mother's meeting with death, integrating a father's passing and my own therapy notes into an artist's book on grief. I have drawn on my family roots and their imagery of mending and blessing, of release and the sacred held within the everyday. And most recently, I have turned to my own experience as a patient.

 

What draws these together is a language of threshold and transformation. Across subjects, my figures merge and dissolve, boundaries soften between self and other, body and landscape, one state and the next, so that the work lives in the in-between, where something is always becoming something else. Within this lies a tension I keep returning to: between holding the truth of an experience in my own voice, faithful to its rawness, and the desire to translate what is difficult into something that can be shared. I try to stay honest to both, to witness and to transform.

 

My work moves through many registers of experience, tender and raw, lyrical, searching, and at times wry or humorous. Some work stays in the difficulty, unflinching, and finds its meaning there; some breaks open toward color, lift, and light; some follows a thread of curiosity or play, wandering toward the unexpected. I don't ask the work to arrive anywhere. I ask it to be true.

Above all, I believe in the transformative power of giving form to what often goes unshared. When the stories we carry are given voice, they open a space between us, where both teller and witness are changed, and where the unspoken becomes a ground for connection. To give form to experience, and to share it, is itself the thing, sometimes a way toward understanding or repair, and sometimes simply the truth of a moment, made visible.