Familiar yet alien, trees inspire awe: existing beyond our human scale with heights up to 60 times our own, life spans up to 100; and holding a strange intelligence, talking via a foreign chemical language, alerting each other to dangers, signaling distress, coming to each other’s aid. We grant them mystical powers, spiritual, even religious status. We live among them, yet struggle to know them. And each is unique, as distinct as a snowflake, a fingerprint, as each one of us.
Our chair, we know intimately. We choose it for how it fits our unique body. It is a haven to which we retire to read, think, write, sit with our selves. Holding our most private parts within its supportive embrace, its seat in time takes the shape of our own: we know it & it knows us. A well-loved armchair is one half of a well-matched couple.
As I document the essence, character, and emotive resonance of each chair, I am also considering its other half, the one not there, and invite the viewer to envision & empathize with its missing occupant, as well as to experience themselves seated in its emotional space.
Abstract pieces exploring the relationship of the individual to the collective, and the visual alchemy of how repetition of a form – an oval, a humanoid form, a natural form like a tree – creates a whole that is qualitatively distinct & meaningful, with potential for interpretation. The repercussions of distinct arrangements of forms can be seen to parallel relations of individuals to each other, and to the larger resulting collective. In this way these pieces use visual structure as a metaphor for social relationships, and for societal structures, histories & hierarchies.
A series of paintings created outdoors during a late-summer residency at the Center for the Arts at Castle Hill on Cape Cod. I was exploring how far I could push the softness and transparency of gouache (a water-based paint typically used & valued for its high opacity). As the warm scented breezes and sunlight gently washed over my bare arms, I gently washed my highly-diluted gouaches over the soft paper surface, experimenting not only with the transparency, but also with how much brush-stroke texture I could record with a paint thinned to water-like consistency. Surprisingly much, it turns out.
