Artist Statement

My work explores the ethereal and material tensions that emerge through relationships between figure and ground relationships, presence and absence, visibility and concealment. I am interested in the ways bodies, including human, botanical, and imagined can occupy, interrupt, replace, or dissolve into their surroundings. Through painting, layering, and the physical accumulation of marks and images, I construct spaces where figures appear simultaneously present and displaced, revealing internal states of conflict, introspection, and transformation.

Across my work, the figure often exists in a state of fragmentation or abstraction. Cropped bodies, flattened forms, atmospheric environments, and layered surfaces disrupt conventional relationships between the figure and ground, creating a sense of psychological and spatial dislocation. These compositions reflect an ongoing interest in otherness and the complexities of inhabiting multiple or shifting identities. Rather than presenting the figure as fixed or complete, I consider it as something continually emerging, receding, and being redefined through its relationship to the surrounding space.
I am particularly interested in the tension between what is visible and what remains concealed. Layers of imagery and gesture create spaces in which traces of bodies and experiences remain present without being fully accessible. The surface becomes a site of accumulation and erasure, where fragments can be obscured, repeated, displaced, or replaced. Through this process, absence becomes another form of presence, and what is hidden becomes as significant as what is revealed.

This investigation extends into my Attunement Series, where the plant becomes a surrogate figure through which I consider embodiment, spirituality, vulnerability, and the relationship between human and nonhuman life. Cropped botanical forms occupy the foreground while direct prints of my hands and fingers form a patterned background. Created through the physical contact of my body with the painting surface, these impressions function as traces of human presence while also becoming abstract fields within the composition. The plant emerges from this ground as another embodied presence, creating a reciprocal tension between human and botanical forms.

Across these bodies of work, I use the figure/ground relationship as both a formal and psychological space. My compositions consider how identity is shaped through relationships with the body, with others, with the spaces we inhabit, and with forms of life beyond ourselves. I am interested in moments when boundaries begin to dissolve: when figure becomes ground, presence becomes absence, and the familiar becomes other. Through fragmentation, layering, displacement, and material trace, my work explores embodiment as fluid, relational, and continually in the process of becoming.