Artist Statement

What has the story of human exceptionalism wrought? I make paintings that respond to this long-standing narrative. A different story, lately told through scientific research (and in ancient stories and still extant indigenous cultures) is of the complex intelligences and social lives of elephants, dolphins, crows, bees, and uncountable species, as well as of fungi and trees. My paintings – inspired by these vast intelligences or consciousnesses that encircle Earth – reimagine the essential entanglements of being. In painting imagined entanglements and re-imagined scales of disparate species, I de-center long-dominant beliefs around human exceptionalism and a dominant (or at least Western) human drive to control nature. Recently, I’ve started including a single human female in the entanglements – representing the feminine as both an aspect of nature under attack and a potential agent in securing a new more viable future. In mixing representation, abstraction, and surrealist approaches, I straddle a perhaps Utopian hope for a future where humans and nature thrive together and a potential Dystopian near-present where instead we usurp nature and destroy the planet (or will it to AI). Color is another way I play with these contradictory positions. I work primarily on canvas or paper and use water-based media (oils, Flashe, watercolor, and sometimes, a bit of textile, thread, or relief sculpture).