Artist's Statement

My work explores how inherited cultural narratives shape societal understandings of vulnerability, danger, power, and agency. I am interested in stories attached to bodies and sexuality, particularly narratives that cast women as threatening, impure, weak, passive, or in need of control, and in what happens when those narratives are interrupted rather than reproduced.

 

Drawing from mythology, religious imagery, literature, art history, natural history, and lived experience, I rework familiar symbols so their meanings become unstable. Figures inhabit dense, often oppressive natural environments where distinctions between innocence and danger, beauty and monstrosity, human and animal, vulnerability and power begin to break down. Animals and nature become participants rather than fixed symbols. Figures may appear constrained or exposed, yet their agency remains quiet and persistent. By returning the viewer’s gaze, they complicate the figure’s position as a passive object and transform looking into an encounter.

 

Layering is central to my process, both materially and conceptually. Glaze accumulates physically as meaning accumulates culturally. What is visible is shaped by what lies beneath it. The depth and luminosity created through glazing contribute to a mystical, dreamlike experience that reflects my interest in the subconscious as a space where cultural narratives and personal meanings are absorbed, transformed, and carried into waking life. Layered imagery resists immediate resolution, allowing beauty and unease to coexist. Beauty becomes a point of entry, drawing the viewer toward the uncanny, where the familiar becomes strange enough to disturb assumptions.
 

As a mother, questions of inheritance have become increasingly immediate. My paintings consider the gendered narratives passed between generations and the possibility of interrupting them. They exist in the space between what has been inherited and what might be changed.