Looking, moving, and making have always been my superpower, and my medicine. Perception, body awareness, and sensory experience play a central role in how I interpret and construct images.
I approach painting as a form of choreography, drawing from my background as a ballet dancer. As a young adult performing on the stages of the world, I transmuted my emotional traumas into beauty, joy, and personal expression. In my mid-twenties at art school I brought this embodied experience to the creation of video dances. As videographer, director, and editor, I learned the languages of montage, signification, and the politicized history of the gaze.
When I paint and draw, I project myself, through the power of my imagination, into the space of the image. The tip of my pen, pencil, and brush act as extensions of my optical apparatus and the sensibilities of my body; I connect to the objects I depict. In a sense, I become one with them. In drawing a face, a tree branch, or the surface of a building, it is as if I am touching them. This feels special, this feels important– I feel changed, because I create.
In my paintings, I tease out layered meanings, interweaving my passion for the great painters of the past such as Manet and Velasquez, with how the body and nervous system respond to visual stimuli. My artworks then become a record of lived experience rather than fixed iconography.
In a world that appears to be rapidly overtaken by artificial intelligence, I sense the profound importance of human creativity which uses materials from the earth – pigment, ink, paper, canvas. These materials capture human thought, gesture, and emotion and mirror them back out into the world, to anyone open enough to slow down, wonder, and gaze at them.