Artist Statement

My work has always focused on moving people more closely to themselves—to their own emotions and their own truths. I create around the themes of separation and transformation. Separation is a universal theme that most people fear at the deepest level. We associate it with abandonment and with a sense of permanence. While my work expresses my personal grief, pain, and transformation in experiencing separation, my hope is to connect with the viewer at a level that helps them, and likewise myself, feel less solitude in the separation. 

Separation gives us an opportunity for transformation—of perspectives, of beliefs, of states of being. However, we are tempted to become so rooted in separation that we ignore or resist the potential for transformation. My goal is to evoke the potential for transformation in the viewer, to draw out their power so that they may move through their own separation to remember a wholeness they forgot they possessed.

My first solo show, “dotted lines,” was built around the separation between my daughters and me when they were temporarily living with their father after our divorce. The work itself transformed as I underwent a transformation as a woman and as a mother. My work in 2017 focused on the separation between my husband and me and the transformation I underwent as a woman and as an artist. The work itself is transformed as I watched myself transform.

My most recent work, “the painted self,” is a photographic series of self-portraits, of the me that is fully found and embodied. Each photograph is expressing, “See me, the warrior—vulnerable yet strong, standing my ground, fighting for myself. Approach me, if you dare."

My hope in sharing such personal states of being is that the viewer will feel a connection, will feel less alone, and will, thus, feel that they can express their own emotions.