Statement

My current work explores the tension between stability and impermanence by placing architectural structures in consuming environments. I experienced Superstorm Sandy firsthand, and in the wake of increasingly frequent severe storms, my personal sense of vulnerability connects with the impending tipping point of climate change. In my drawings and prints, buildings become a stand-in for humans, a metaphor for manmade efforts to create shelter that are ultimately vulnerable to environmental extremes.

Vacillating between depiction and abstraction, my aim is to realize environmentally charged psychological states as spatial images, residing somewhere between landscapes and composited worlds of marks and scrapes, haze and dust. My works frequently derive from construction sites and other architectural spaces, often filtered through memory or dreams. These starting points become transformed, abstracted, and sometimes obliterated through drawing, revision, and reduction. Many of these structures are skeletal, shown either before their completion or after their destruction. My images contain a sense of rise and collapse, of construction and disintegration that mirrors the precarious state in which humans find themselves the twenty-first century. 

While my practice is rooted in drawing, I employ the visual language of printmaking to both support and provide a counterpoint to my imagery. I enjoy the alchemical properties of printmaking—how the surface of wood can become air, to be at once an assertively flat surface and a spatial, breathing image. I find the processes of physical erosion or destruction resonate with the features of these disasters. Wood in particular allows me to contrast palpable manmade structures and their atmospheric environments. I create these tenuously wrought buildings with gouges, line gravers, electric tools and wire brushes. Abrading the surface is at once a destructive act and a creative one, drawing out the nature of the wood where appropriate and shaping it into either air or architecture. 


Curriculum Vitae

Using Format