About Me
Born and raised in rural Vermont, I studied art, writing, and documentary studies at Bates College in Maine. I have an MPhil in Illustration (Visual Arts) from Stellenbosch University in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where I lived for over six years. I now live and work in Barre (“granite capital of the world”), Vermont.
Artist Statement
Since my early childhood, I have used limitations to inspire and propel my creativity. As an artist, my visual storytelling is based on personalized design systems. I construct underpaintings out of collage in a highly selective process: I sift through mainstream lifestyle, craft, humorous, and news magazines from (roughly) the 1940s through 1970s, looking for colors, gestures, and contexts that strike me. The gender, race, and class norms portrayed in advertisements and stories require interrogation: who is left out reveals as much as about American cultural history as who is included.
Working intuitively, I deconstruct and then re-construct figures and scenes from the magazine photographs to re-contextualize, curate, and rearrange cultural material into new, inclusive narratives set in ordinary scenes. Using paint as my editing tool, I work on top of the collages to flatten and distill the scene down to its focal point, creating a united scene out of fractured elements. My figures, buildings, animals, and urban and wild landscapes are inherently off-kilter and awkward — pieced together whole from fragments and scraps. I hope the vulnerability revealed inspires the viewer to connect with what they see. Using formal means (shading and perspective, primarily) I encourage the viewer pause and enter into the visual space — to believe the absurd, the unlikely, the ambiguous — and then to construct their own personal narrative. By capturing a moment of action and interaction in a kind of frozen, surreal choreography, I am exploring what it means to be complicatedly inter-connected in this fragile, impermanent human existence.