Artist's Statement:
I use drawing, printmaking and textiles to find ways to connect with the people and environment around me.
Sometimes this means reacting to a space or experience, externalizing my perception or questions about it, making what is invisible seen.
In 2018 I did a project called Lost Gloves of Cambridge, as a way to explore my neighborhood and environment as a catalyst for creating. I collected all the lost gloves I found during a period of one week, created stencil printed and embroidered signs drawing attention to them and hung the signs (with the glove attached) in approximately the places where I found them. Some gloves were taken from the signs, some new lost gloves or other lost items were attached.
Sometimes I am creating opportunities for interaction with other people, leaving behind visual and physical evidence of this exchange.
In my ongoing project Clothe, I work with people I know to custom-make a printed garment for them in exchange for some bartered skill of their own and an interview about their experience with clothing and self presentation. I am interested in questioning and finding ways around the consumerist system we live in.
As my senior thesis project for my BFA I interviewed people I knew about how they imagined the Virgin Mary would look and be if she were to appear to them. I created reductive woodcut prints based on their descriptions and desires. I have recently been revisiting this idea of creating works that serve as a kind of vessel for peopleâ s emotional or spiritual issues and making woodcut print installations using their stories as a starting point.
I believe one of the roles of artists is to draw attention to and make beauty out of the mundane, overlooked and sometimes unattractive aspects of our spaces and selves; to invest our care, our handwork, our emotional and creative labor in unexpected places, transforming them in ways that prompt response and reflection. My works become places for feelings, thoughts and experiences (whether my own or othersâ ) to reside and to confront us.