Artist Statement

Just an updated version, its not polished or coherent, more like a compilation of free writing and fragmented ideas:

I hold fast to the belief that all art exists as self portraits: mirroring life stories. Perhaps this is why my art has taken on a nomadic style, constantly changing, growing new roots, and shadowing me in my every day.

An obsession with texture has pervaded my artistic practice. After many years my work has progressed into portraits of neuroses, of natural tendencies that mutate and smother personal growth. These neuroses, these obsessive and compulsive tendencies, germinate out of abstraction and initially go unnoticed. I find allegories for this in nature, in repetitive patterns, and in texture. The base conflict in a neurosis is the indeterminacy of boundaries in ones environment. The fear that arises from this instability proliferates rituals and feeds the disorder. Ritual, religion, and therefore, science build their foundations motivated by this fear. As a result, we come to conceptualize our world through the manipulation and taxonomic arrangement of nature.

In our culture, Nature is represented through heavily mediated guises. Presented symbolically and through the lens of ideology, Nature is our society's hand mirror, reflecting the conceptual limits we impose on the world around us. The materials I use, how they are used, push back against these scientific and Platonic traditions. I wanted to create something that explores these tensions indirectly by juxtaposing the human tendency to organize, to reduce, with the chaos - the excess - that exists in the natural world. Yet, these are not representations of nature. These elements that lie just beyond our scope of representation and control, the abject materials and textures that are faceted through a human hand, are nature.

Some artists undertake the role of Barthes' modern scriptor, quilting together pieces of cultural information and allowing the audience to create meaning. My motivations are less entwined in Postmodern theory. I recognize that the impressions an artwork creates are subject to the culture it exists within, but I want to retain the artist's personal relationship with the work. The work I produce reflects my relationships to the world through the intimacy that exists between artist and art.

I have not completely broken free of my history with painting, with canvas, but instead of working in, I have decided to work with. The canvas represents an apex of my past attempts to preserve and codify my environment into art. It geometric, white, a blank slate. However, the history of a canvas is that of the organisms: plants harvested and shaped into something that is asked to signify nothing. It was at its inception messy and unpredictable. Through my artistic process I not only want this unpredictability to reemerge, but I want to maintain some of the smooth rectangularity of the canvases.

Ritual is not only denoted in the individual pieces, it exists in the process of their assemblage. Certain days are designated for specific tasks (painting with oils, with acrylics, sewing bones into the canvas), yet there exists a very physical and intimate interaction with the work during its creation. My work is corporeal, it is abject. The body is what our society fears most - it dies, ages, transmutes. It ebbs and flows with the energies of a world that we cannot simplify or contain.

My art does not force its presence upon anyone, it was produced for those who willingly partake in the intimate relations the art engenders. We are all subjected to the wave of indeterminance. Although, through the obsessive compulsions characteristic of neurosis and (in many ways) ritual we attempt to organize, not the Other, but our own ambiguity.


2009