Work Statement

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about who I am as an artist and a woman after becoming a mother. In the spring of 2020, I began my painting practice again, seven years after my first son was born. I felt a surging energy of unrest as I worked to personally confront the pandemic, longstanding racial injustice and the global climate crisis. With lockdown in place, I painted in the woods behind my home, a place where my boys and I spend most days exploring.

After months of attempting to make the oil paintings of my past and failing, I started asking myself, “Can I paint the landscape and respond to my present emotional energy at the same time?” I began drawing from moving water which runs through an abandoned feldspar quarry behind my home in Maine. I let go of oil paint, drew on paper with graphite and painted using water based media.

The union of drawing and painting in my new work has created a freedom for me to ask new questions and experiment with the duality of expressionism and landscape painting. I am working to record my visual language more specifically to who I am as an artist, woman and a mother.