I paint and draw in order to explore and better understand concepts like humility, vulnerability, solitude, grief and loss, memory, subjectivity, transitions, healing, sexuality, and living in the present moment.
I spend quite a bit of time thinking about and painting my skin and skin color, as it has been arbitrarily defined and assigned meaning. Like my gender, even as it is dynamic and shifting, cloudy and unscientific, its perception by others and their relationship to power ends up directly impacting and, in the most significant ways, dictating much of the course of my life. This leads to and reinforces both an overwhelming sense of disconnection, as well as an urgent desire to reconnect, repair, relearn, revise, and repeat.
As I long for a seemingly mythical and elusive (re)connection to nature, and/or history, and/or spirit, in my work I am attempting to locate these things in, near, or on my body. The act of making art, the repetitive, physical movements involved, over whatever amount of time it takes to complete a piece, is itself an attempt at such connection, and an attempt to sit with my present-moment reality with curiosity and without judgement.