ARTIST STATEMENT

By investigating the connections between people, spaces, and objects, I explore how intimacy forms—what encourages and what hinders it. I depict the people around me, both in real life and inflated scale, and uncover portraiture through both human and object as subjects. Using paint, fiber, glass, and pencil, I explore how these disparate materials can come together to depict a person and their possessions. Painted figures sit among soft woven brick, desk, and shoe. Shiny figures, wide-eyed behind the glass barriers that they are stuck within. Whether it’s a full-wall depiction of a bedroom, or the humble Ziploc bag, my work bears both a striking resemblance to, and a bizarre distortion of real life. With subjects most often drawn from my own life and family, spending quality time creating their portraits allows me a new opportunity for connection. In obsessing over replicating each detail within an image, I am gifted with another chance to be with these fading memories and thoughts, and to accumulate time with that person in a new way. The altered lens of documented memory is integrally related to the processing of these subjects. Yes, I am able to spend time with these individuals, but will it always be a depiction of them as represented through the lens, cataloged and curated digitally? How does this speak to the way they are remembered? How does a memory change each time it is thought of? Through continued exploration of these subjects, I hope to bring clarity to some of my own thoughts and how they resonate with others. My work is representative of my own life and experiences, but they exist equally as vehicles for others to reflect on their own connections.