In my recent work, I have been developing a series of theater-inspired paintings and sculptures that blur the boundaries between animation, graphic design, and fine art. Through my use of a luminescent palette and theatrically charged compositions, I am working to create a decidedly feminine perspective that embodies my generation’s precarious state of un-balance.

My work involves a pseudo-scientific examination of absurd, abstracted biological forms rendered in polymer clay and depicted at a highly magnified scale. I first photograph the iconic forms, then digitally alter the image, create a high-quality print of the digital file, and finally translate this image into paint. In doing so, I blur the distinctions between painting, sculpture, digital modeling, and photography. This allows me to explore the ambiguities and distortions that occur within our highly mediated environment.

My work is an index of the weird experiences I have and the mysterious and mundane objects that surround me. I have developed a ragtag lexicon that includes candy canes, black cats, shadows, windows, skulls, beach balls, and extension cords—characters populating a tableau, often a reflection of my studio. The objects in these scenes that are void of humans take on anthropomorphic qualities tinged with dark humor. There is always a good mix of fact and fiction, of confession and deception, of the personal and the universal, of the premeditated and the accidental.

Experimental in material and process, my work is informed by the language of painting, the history of abstraction, chemistry, color, landscape, and the grid. Favoring the fluidity of pigmented liquid plastic, I construct physical objects that function optically as well as sculpturally, engaging both vision and touch.

In my paintings I explore the flux of perception through rigorous visual systems of assertive and contrary elements. In decoding the material construction and building strategies of a work, viewers become aware that the logic of the blueprint breaks with the experience of the work as a whole. The process of seeking understanding points them to awareness of their own perceptual faculties. There is no single way to perceive the paintings’ refractive breakdown of the elements of logic, cognition, experience, and reality.

Our experiences are at any given moment heavily influenced by design. Artificiality permeates most aspects of reality. As a culture, we are constantly interacting with architectural space, graphic design, text, imagery, and objects. Within urban, suburban, and rural spaces, the landscape can at times be saturated with the man-made. As we move through these spaces, our visual memory is experiencing an overload. Ultimately, much of what we see within these saturated landscapes never fully materializes in our memory as an image or as a picture.

I derive the structure, material, and process of my work from uncanny visual circumstances in the architectural terrain of our constructed environs. These points of interest are generated in the space where intentions collide. There is a futility in our attempts to construct our environment for efficiency, since the systems are doomed to corrode and fail. I acknowledge the idiosyncrasies of the site where I work to initiate the piece. I utilize this framework to probe questions related to structural integrity and the viewer’s encounter, and to subvert expectations.

I think about extremism in its various forms (religious, political) and then I try to work intuitively. Gradient planes and beams reflect and refract light from various sources. I mask off dozens of small areas and create miniature expressionist paintings that I layer, stack, and organize into a space for the many ideas I am interested in co-existing with one another. These paintings take on various forms and include imagery from my childhood, such as the Rocky Mountains and the occasional church steeple.

My art is the transmutation of mind energy into physical form. The mind’s ability to deliver new thoughts of insight, intuition, and creative inventiveness has never ceased to amaze me. I am fascinated with those moments of inspiration that hit me like a lightning bolt. This is at the core of why I create. My art is a culminated journey and manifestation of a personal, visual language. The ephemeral nature of ideas is what keeps me in constant motion, sketching, experimenting, playing with ambiguities and blobby squiggles of paint.

My paintings are about my relationship to the world: they are cerebral and physical, intellectual and visceral. The disaster motif is a metaphor I use to discuss personal, sociopolitical, environmental, and ideological issues. Through the motif, I explore the existential self and examine personal narratives, some of them literal and others enigmatic. Notions of loss, place, memory, space, and time are central to my examination of personal experiences from my past and present. The imagery is in constant flux, but always returns to a pile-up. A pile-up is everything and it is nothing.