My studio practice has consistently been painting, often extending into the realm of installation. Research, reading and exploration are vital to my process, consistently driving my work forward. I continuously seek and study epic narratives, creating my own for each work. I am fascinated with crowds of beings converging in one space at one time. This includes religious practices, festivals, political gatherings, orgies, feeding frenzies, stampedes, riots, migrations, etc. The pattern and beauty that emerges from these chaotic scenes pulls me into the studio to recreate that same energy.
Recently I have been drawn to images of battles and duels; I am interested in what drives us to violence and destruction of life. My dismay paired with the attraction I feel for the conflict that I see around me leads me towards research into how violence in the animal kingdom mirrors our own, and particularly where it overlaps with human behavior. Violence is most often a problem of gender and I work to understand why. This drives me to look at what is nature and what is nurture, always searching for answers, and puzzling through the beauty I find at that intersection.
Developing this work and other curiosities have led me to collaborate with other artists in my community. Working alongside another artist has been a vital part of my practice and I look forward to future opportunities. Site-specific projects in particular have been the perfect place to problem solve and expand my work. The balance I look for alone in the studio I have also found through public art, installation and artist residencies.
Though I traditionally work on a large-scale, when I first moved to Seattle from Baltimore in 2014 I had to scale down. In 2016 I was awarded a grant to create a small book of drawings loosely based around the structure of a graphic novel, to which I recently finished the sequel. I built the book sequentially, telling the story behind paintings I have been working on for the past ten years. It consists of small drawings pulled from the animal kingdom that investigate my thoughts on sport and war, and their shared violence. Image-based, the story takes place on a fictional island in which only male members of different species have survived, and explores the destruction that follows. In this second book, the human men have died off, and their animal counterparts have been left to take over the island and fight for power. I have begun work on the third in the series. The final part of this trilogy looks at how moths, butterflies and insects would interact in this dystopian vision of an alternate world, completing a cycle that will allow me to start again from the beginning.
