Statement

The relationship between poetry and abstraction is the heart of my current research in the studio. I write poetry to record and investigate my lived experience. From these poems, I create abstract images that become visual allegories for complex emotional situations. Each image investigates metaphor, cadence, and the allegorical properties of materials. The dialogue between abstraction and poetics creates the necessary nuance to tackle perennial phenomena like love, grief, and sex as they relate to intersectionality, queer dynamics, and cultural histories. The mark-making in my paintings is made up of words that become obfuscated throughout the painting process until only fragments remain. Through erasure and repetition, the act of writing becomes an idiosyncratic drawing language. This process embeds my substrates with their own histories, giving them a sense of time. I emphasize affect over legibility. Sometimes I intuitively compose poems as I paint and other times I come to a painting with a predetermined poem in mind. I use materials like ink, graphite, colored pencil, and paper pulp to reinforce the relationship between painting and poetry. The reliance on my hand reflects my vulnerability and the connection I strive to create. My heterogenous color sensibility is rooted in observation, evoking subconscious associations with real world places. Situated within the traditions of abstract expressionism, post modernism, and confessional poetry, each piece interrogates humanity through specific personal narratives and the images they conjure.