Current
I am concerned with the poetics of gaps, of unexamined spaces behind doors and under stairways, between trees and under rocks. Between initial impressions and deeper, more elaborate understandings. Between memories. Between articulated thoughts. Between pockets of usable time. Because these spaces are overlooked, awkward, or otherwise not functional, they are vessels for the imagination to fill with processes and materials that are themselves awkward or fantastical. I explore such gaps through the methodologies of drawing, installation, and contemporary dance, using the accumulation of material and the shape of my own body to illuminate their potential.
My artwork takes a variety of forms, from works on paper, to site specific installations made from bed linens, to videos built from movement sequences that I create with my body. For me as the maker these forms are intimately bound up with each other. The observational intensity honed by one way of making spills over into and clarifies the daydream revery of another. The sidewalk puddle found after rain is the source for a drawing, and an action. The scrap of paper from the sidewalk that becomes part of a collage is collected on a daily walk that is research for a new video. What all of my works share is a rootedness in pedestrian activities and concrete sensory experience that forms a physical, phenomenological basis for art making. I work to uncover the wonder of everyday experience. In this time of climate change, as our species faces the ramifications of our way of being, it feels essential to engage in this deeply felt examination of my surroundings.
I bear witness to what we have before us. I watch it change and grow and give way over time.
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Bed Sheets
I make site-specific installations from second-hand bed sheets and pillowcases. I am informed by: my mother’s meticulously organized linen closet; the tenants of color, line, shape, and mark native to painting; and the facts of a site as I find it.
I use my work to investigate the nooks and crannies of a site. I work intuitively, folding and piling my sheets on and around the significant architectural features of an exhibition space, poking them into cracks as far as a fold will allow, and wrapping them around columns or beams until they sag and collapse under their own weight. I am committed to material honesty: my installations are constructed only with bed sheets and pillowcases and their interactions with a particular space; I do not use other materials or hidden structures to prop them up or keep them in place.
I pay rigorous attention to gradual color shifts and color relationships that develop within my works, and to the forms that grow from the repetition of folds and knots. The result of my stacking, draping, and layering is a painting made in space. The interactions among color combinations, printed patterns, folding systems, and the underlying structure of chair, windowsill, or ceiling joist become visually engaging and reference gestural brush marks or large color fields. These connections to abstract and minimalist painting are reinforced by the repetition of folds and materials. Because I have removed them from their domestic context, the sheets can operate on this formal, physical level.
However, embedded within these satisfying abstractions are everyday human dramas. Because I am using these materials that are so intimately connected with human bodies, the works are infused with the memories and habits of their previous owners. Since these previous owners are strangers, their stories are lost. I have to decide for myself what kind of person slept every night in a jungle bedroom with lion faces and zebra herds; who purchased the slinky nylon satin and what they expected from it; who chose flowers; who chose stripes. The sheets become fabric for pieced together, re-imagined histories, including the narrative of my own folding, sorting, and stacking over the 10 years I have been making this work.
The physical nature of my materials, combined with their connection to the domestic realm, allows me to address many different topics at once. In my work, I can talk about painting and storytelling, reality and reverie, color and memory, all at the same time. Whether piled in the awkward corners of a room or layered on a shelf, the sheets are reminders of a variety of human activities: sleeping, dreaming, housekeeping, lovemaking, birthing, dying, etc. They offer us a glimpse into the linen closets of other people and other times, and perhaps allow us to recall our own past experiences in the comforting confines of bed.
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Painting & Drawing
The paintings and drawings pictured on this website are representative of my long-term studio practice, through which I focus on color and pattern and use as visual research to support my better-known installation work. I have come to understand painting as my way to record and process visual stimuli I encounter every day or find stored in my imagination. I work from memories of these visual experiences: a kitchen filled with buttery sunlight, half-dirty shirts spilling from a closet, cluttered tabletops, a brightly painted door, a violent thunderstorm. On the large sheets of paper pinned to the walls of my studio, these glimpses morph into big areas of washy blue-gray gouache or thick striped piles of fluorescent paint. The resulting works are a combination of old and new interests, blending crooked drawings of half remembered rooms with exuberant painted patterns. This regular visual play with color, form, and pattern is how I keep my eyes and mind fresh; a blank piece of paper allows me to test my ideas in a gravity-free zone that is independent of the laws of time and physics. The paintings are a research lab for my three-dimensional work in which possibilities are limitless.