STATEMENT

Across media ranging from murals and works on paper to painting, collage, and installation, I chart experiences of place and landscape—including the colors, patterns, light, shapes, and shadows found across the natural world and the built environment. Utilizing concepts from human geography, I study the patterns built by our individual and collective moments and decisions: legacies that shape the terrain. By highlighting these often overlooked patterns, I explore and learn from the imprint we leave upon the world around us. The primary materials I draw from include photographs, sketches, and maps—including immigration routes, population density, native flora and fauna, and topography—while my experiences with places I have lived, visited, and researched provide additional inspiration.

My process is multi-layered, much like how a topographic map details the shape and character of the earth’s surface. When making works on paper and panel, I digitally trace and combine elements from my sources before etching the resulting images into the surfaces of paper or Masonite panels before painting atop them. Repetition of these shapes and colors renders them into symbols and a common symbolic language emerges, creating a dialogue between works. Each layered material serves as a building block, creating dimensional paintings that inhabit the spaces in which they are installed.

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When creating public installations and large works, themes and symbols from these smaller works are examined on a grander scale. Light, color, shape, and pattern are employed as a means of exploring ecological relationships in particular places, spaces and even times. The work interacts directly with the environment surveyed; site-responsiveness is critical to the success of the installation.

Often utilizing “found light” to create new environments with laser cuts of area flora, by integrating natural plant life within architectural spaces the intersection of these built spaces and natural landscapes becomes a microcosm of the local environment. This expansion of worldview, like looking down at a map to see the larger picture, allows us to focus on our place amongst the past, present, and future of the landscape.

In all my work I aim to heighten the viewer’s sense of orientation, belonging, connection, and impact. My work creates a unique language to describe the lives and memories of the people who move within landscapes and spaces, and the patterns and imprints we leave upon and learn from the world around us.