Artist’s Statement
My art is a tool for deciphering a chaotic, yet beautiful world. I have always embraced a distinctly feminist aesthetic—favoring curved, organic lines over right angles and elevating pink to a primary color. These visual choices became the foundation of my artistic vocabulary. Beginning my career in Oklahoma, my art inquiry and self-portraiture served as a means of navigating societal structures and interrogating dichotomies such as Housework/Artwork, Rich/Poor, High/Low, Woman/Man. Questions surrounding the distortions of dominant historical narratives and my enduring engagement with classic literature further informed my approach across media, including video, installation, and abstract painting.
Emotion is the driving force in all of my work. It becomes a physicality that shapes both process and form. My video projects are often political or social responses. I find this medium works differently, allowing the work to be more cerebral. Yet, for me, technology is a barrier to direct emotion.
Painting, on the other hand, is a direct channel to a higher consciousness. Color becomes an extension of feeling—transferred from brush or hand to canvas in a gesture that encodes emotion. Each stroke or splash operates as a cipher, capturing a moment that, as Joan Mitchell observed, exists outside of time.
Even as I have explored various media, including video, installation, ceramics, and performance, I have long identified as an abstract painter. Formal concerns such as edges, depth, and texture remain germane. The physical dimensions of the canvas begin the conversation. A professor once remarked that “men paint vertically; women should paint horizontally.” That assertion galvanized my resolve to often paint vertically, an emblem of a rebellious nature. I often sit in front of a blank canvas for hours. I never sketch or plan. Instead, I wait for the canvas to speak—paint here, paint this feeling. Composer Barbara Monk Feldman’s words resonate deeply: “If I see an idea coming, I run the other way.”
Recently, my work has turned toward what is vanishing—swimming holes, waterfalls, and other sites of natural wonder that once seemed eternal. These paintings seek to preserve not only a moment but also a sense of place. My innate need for natural beauty led me to live in the country, and as I grow older, the metaphysical dimension of transubstantiation feels increasingly urgent. To take materials such as paint and canvas and change them into a luminescent space one feels as though one can enter, for me, is an act of alchemy.
This inquiry deepened during a recent residency in France, where I worked in an eleventh-century tower surrounded by beauty at every turn. My current series draws upon memories of earlier homesteading in New Mexico and recent experiences in France, creating abstract landscapes that function as visual archives of earth-bound simple pleasures. Inspired by ancient teachings that call for our stewardship of nature for the next seven generations, I regard these paintings as prayers—acts of preservation and reverence for a world in flux.