statement

My new collection of mixed media drawings and paintings where very much inspired by a sewing & book-making class that I recently took. In this new medium, I had to question: how do I use my hands? How do I develop a craft? Reading is different from looking, and making is different from painting. I found that the process of writing on my canvases and sewing on paper slows me down. It is methodical and meditative. In part the sewing pieces on paper become about textures, textures which bring your attention to the process of the needle & thread, the resistance and fragility of the paper, the repetitious nature of the process. In contrast, writing on my canvases makes me aware of how the flat canvas is durable and hearty, as if each blank canvas is an empty page, waiting for my mark-making.

Much of my work is about the illegibility of gesture. Writing on the canvas is like sewing on the paper: episodes of my process which resist’s the viewer’s reading. On canvas, I often instigate a sentence: one to repeat. Choosing from a mundane event, a memory, or an intimate experience, the repetition of this phrase devolves into hieroglyphics, nothing legible for others. I move from language to gesture, legibility to opacity.

My recent work is informed by my earlier performance art, as it investigates the role of the body in mark making. How might repetition, and extended gestures, become legible? How might repletion, or the body interrupt access to words? In my new painting, letters across a canvas invite, but refuse reading. My gestures with translucent and opaque paint render the difficulty of accessing language: the viewer wants to read through, to know or understand, but are instead kept at a distance.