Artist Statement

I am a collage artist whose work aims to fashion new forms of dialogue between past and present. I search in art history for representations of power and privilege, and through various juxtapositions, cutting, stenciling, and the carving of negative space, I layer new stories onto old objects.

Formally, I have been interested in expanding the uses of the Isometric Helix (aka French Curves), a tool typically used in architecture, ship building and industrial drafting to generate blueprints and plans. I use it as a visual metaphor for world building, power, and desire. Its unique geometries and especially interior circular and curvilinear negative spaces are invitations to carve portals to different layers, contexts, perspectives, and time periods. My work relies on extreme precision in cutting of the Helix shape with, on the other hand, a continual search for (and lots of playful experimentation with) looser, more enigmatic, and even destabilizing imagery to obscure and reveal information, and offer new associations.

My work incorporates Renaissance portraiture, Greek, Roman and African sculpture, Pre-Columbian and Islamic ceramic ware, all objects that were accessioned to create the world’s richest museums. With these images as a starting point, I contemplate the thoughts and aspirations of the makers and subjects being represented, the excesses, wars, and destruction that their cultures occasioned, and the potential futures that might be written arising from repatriation, restitution and repair. My collages propose new truths, complicate notions of means and ends, and anticipate new narratives.

My whimsical Viewing Rooms conjure a refuge in a world of confusion, dislocation, and chaos. While slyly poking fun at the current rage of AI-generated mockups of art on walls, these miniature spaces convey that no matter how solid the ground is beneath our sofas and seats, the world is fragmented beyond comprehension. I appropriate images found in shelter magazines and home furniture catalogues to craft the floor and fore-ground, and then invite the viewer in to make associations from the jumble of cut-up strips of paper--in fact, the detritus of my collage practice--juxtaposed to form a fictional wall montage.