Statement

Forging our understanding of our place in the world in light of an identity that includes gender, family and memory has been the subject of my paintings for the past 40 years. Our ‘world’ refers to both our inner psychic construct and our tactile reality.

My current series of paintings embrace art historical and familial to explore the inner and outer life of a woman alive in the 21st century. The series expands the narrative which I began more than twenty-three years ago in my series Beautiful Girls. That series grappled head-on with identity, relationships and the transition from girlhood to womanhood. In this current series of paintings, my inquiry progresses into the elemental and eternal incarnate of the feminine.

At times She is reduced to an essential self that contorts and self-objectifies, a prisoner enclosed within a skin sack. In her next painted breath, she resists and repeals the objectification. She is more than a sum of her parts. Her life is a series of sentenced missions replaying ancient tropes and familiar roles while deeply aware of contradictory realities. She is your sister, daughter, mother, wife, girlfriend, stranger that passes you on the street. She is an everywoman who sees in one eye-full the double hexagram of beauty/despair in an increasingly fragile world. She grieves the crisis of the natural world that feels to be slipping away. She moves through our new landscaped reality in a fractured existence, at times making a small safe world within a menacing one. She simultaneously looks both outward and inward in a quest for answers, security, and redemption.

In the past two years my inquiry has narrowed as I search for allegorical essential feminine self. This reckoning comes at a time where personal crisis intersects with the existential crisis of climate change and the current global pandemic. Archetypal figures of mother, maiden, warrior are taking center stage, enacting and engaging in an emotional reckoning, and grieving the irreversible loss of swaths of the natural world that is threatening our survival.

My paintings make an intentional choice to show the natural settings that are quickly disappearing, places that our collective unconsciousness knows as The Garden. As the existential crisis of climate change bears down upon us, abundance and the balance of the natural world feels like a long-ago fable, a hollow construct. These ‘Gardens’ that my protagonist finds herself are based on many of Martin Johnson Heade’s 19th c. paintings of exotic and unspoiled ecosystems, fully intact at the time of their rendering, a mere century ago. At the time of their painting, these exotic wildernesses would have been nearly impossible for the average citizen to access. Now, the prospect of visiting these locales fades as large swaths are eradicated by the hands of humankind.