Either art is the site of a philosophical investigation which is relevant to human experience, or it is nothing.

~Mel Bochner

Artist Statement

My work explores the journey of understanding one’s place in the world through color, line, and form.  My imagery is often initiated through my synesthetic experience with music, literature, and our relationship with other living organisms in our world.

As a queer artist born into a conservative, religious, heteronormative community, the universal need to understand how one’s identity, needs, and desires relate to the rest of the human family, its culture, and the broader physical and biological world has always been a core part of my life experience.

The literature and music that I find most compelling are works that speak to the themes of self-awareness relative to one’s position in society, culture or geography, or address the human need to find order in what can be a seemingly random, chaotic world.  Sometimes it can be a very concrete narrative such as the journey of the Bundrens through rural Mississippi as they try to bury their dead matriarch in Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying.  Sometimes it can be very abstract like the toying with the interplay of chaos and order in free jazz such as that found in the work of musicians such as David S. Ware.

In addition, observing the behavior, shapes, or colors of other organisms that coinhabit the world with us leads to thinking and image making that ties into these themes.  This can range from the nearly psychedelic color and pattern shifting of a giant cuttle fish, to a great heron swallowing a large fish headfirst, to the microscopic movement of paramecia on a slide.

These influences converge, and sometimes fight for attention in my compositions that move along the spectrum from representation to abstraction and back again as they create mindscapes that hopefully create a dialog with the viewer and their personal history and experience.

Brief Bio

My initial plans were to obtain a BFA and MFA, however those plans were cut short at the beginning of the senior year of my BFA program when a local state trooper caught me on date with the man who is currently my husband.  The trooper reported us to the school and we were forced out because we were queer.

After moving to the east coast to build a new life for ourselves, I returned to school at Old Dominion University where I designed, proposed, and completed an interdisciplinary degree in Arts Administration, which I followed with a Masters of Business Administration at the Graduate School of Management, UC Davis.  After working in corporate America for several years to support myself while pursuing my art on weekends and weeknights, I left the workforce in early 2024 and am now focusing exclusively on my art work.