Artist Statement

Oil Painting empowers me. The medium’s ability to recreate and re-imagine reality is endlessly absorbing. In oils, I can give places and objects a new version of life— one vibrating with an intensity that seems to capture how I feel about the world.

And I usually feel really good about the world— about its malleability, about its endless possibilities for beauty— but art also helps me explore the world’s duplicities and fragilities: chasing beauty can be perilous.

I’ve long been interested in the history of domestic space and public space, and particularly in how women navigated these spaces. My academic work focused on how theatrical behavior moved into the 18th Century public sphere in new and surprising ways, and I researched print history, newly forming religious sects, and the behavior of theater-goers. I grew up in a theatrical family, and spent many tedious hours backstage, and the theatrical is one of my lenses— and it emerges in my work as set-like backdrops and in masked figures, and in my understanding of how humans interact with their landscapes, their objects, and each other. My ongoing series of mid-century domestic doyennes with animal heads is an exploration of my own role as erstwhile farmer, as mother, and as wife.

My still life paintings explore prosaic domestic objects, set into conversation with each other. These objects have become characters in small domestic dramas.

My landscapes, by necessity, are of a land manipulated by humanity. The daily changes of the my landscape makes the very act of fixing it feel both fantastic and divorced from reality.

I returned to ceramics a few years ago as part of a quest to more completely vertically integrate my work. I wanted not just to grow the flowers and vegetables in my still lifes, but I also wanted to make their vessels. I also make many of my own art supplies, like my inks, pens, and my watercolor brushes. I’m inspired by the fragments of ceramics we constantly unearth on our farm, and by the whispers of domestic history we find in our restorations (bat skeletons, wallpaper fragments). The materiality of everyday life has absorbed me for years, and I don’t see it waning. I am honored to be part of the cycle of making domestic objects, helping make domestic spaces more meaningful, and helping the viewer see their meanings.