If I had to describe a quality that applies to the art that I like best, I’d use the word poetic. What do I mean by poetic? The dictionary defines it as “having an imaginative or sensitively emotional style of expression” and that’s a fine beginning. However I also see it as a juxtaposition of economy and extravagance. Information, both visual and metaphorical, is reduced to only what is needed in order to open the work for interpretation. Along with this economy, however, the artist must imbue the work with richness and intensity. This can be performed with an explosion of ornamentation, form, marks, materials or even emptiness. The key is both revelation and mystery, an authenticity not burdened with elucidation. The desire to create this quality of expression imbues all of my studio production and serves my conceptual concerns. I am interested in exploring people’s wounds and desires and how those things shape individual personalities and relationships with others and the world. I am interested in the perverse and the redemptive, the forlorn and the transcendent; the way that each person’s life is at once a comedy and a tragedy. I explore these issues through ideas about the body, language and narrative.

My visual sources have expanded and evolved as I explore these ideas throughout various bodies of work. Initially, the illustrations from medical and nursing texts were my primary sources. The most recent addition to my stockpile of visual references are photos and sketches of various “antiquities” collected from in both the British museum, the Louvre, Musee National des Arts et Métiers and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. These objects hold a beauty intrinsic to the things themselves—outside of use or historical value. They are emblematic of desire and often suggest archetypal characters and forms. Further more, my study of these objects contained an overarching sense that “a person made these” and that there was something about this making that was also about being in the world.

My time in the studio is a time for me to consider questions about what it is to be human. How do forces of denial, interruption, indulgence or transcendence shape us? Our psyches are in turn vulnerable, resilient, and transcendent. The uncompromising temporality of our existence is terrible and grand; we struggle to invent ourselves. When we pause for breath or reel with the blows there are moments of something like clarity in that bright and painful moment beauty emerges.