Artist Statements
I am a classic over-thinker. I have a history of being my own worst enemy. Stuck in my past hurt, reliving and even recklessly and accidentally recreating toxic situations because they felt like home. It turns out my true comfort was synonymous with my biggest fears. I’ve been working towards this discovery for years. In understanding myself now, I have helped myself. I know how to fix myself now. It’s a wonderful relief that I can now embrace and begin my newest journey of healing. At the same time, it’s shameful, looking into the eyes of my own worst enemy and seeing that it is actually a mirror. The cure is to love myself and that feels like an impossible mountain to climb with my history. However, I am starting to like myself and this body of work is reflective of just that. These works are a walk through my head space over the course of three months.
In July I decided to buy a book to create in everyday. A no pressure approach to a new collection. I set perimeters of the following things:
- Leave all art created in the book. Nobody else will ever need to see it. This is for me.
- I wanted to PLAY. To tap into my childhood escape of creating art. Where it was relaxing and whatever came out, came out. To have fun. To never judge. To sit in the discomfort of the piece, to continue, to repair and nurture it until completion. To never destroy it. To spend all day working on the same piece. To live with it and let it evolve throughout the day.
- To experiment with more materials.
- To be inspired by objects that I find on my French Quarter walks and my collection of many random things, all of which would be considered garbage.
- And they had to each contain my journal entries in order to continue destroying them, as in my last series.
The pieces sometimes came out contemporary, sometimes whimsical, but they all felt authentic. Not all of the works ended up in this collection and they remain in that book. As in my last series, my writing is the inspiration and root of these works. They have energy transferred into them and in just one week of previewing them to the world I’ve had such wonderful selling experiences with clients. These works are deeply personal and are again loaded with abstracted text that is not largely legible.
Drawing is the biggest addition to this new series. I dug out all of my different pencils and pastels. I created these pieces very intuitively. I let my mind be quiet and listened to classical music. That practice has given me such focus when I’m working. I let my mind immerse itself in wordless music, focus on my feelings, and let the words, drawing and creating just flow.
These works carry weight and are precious vessels containing so much more than a visual composition. My art is my only offspring. They are always one of a kind, never to be recreated. There is great value in things that are truly unique like these. A lot of the world has forgotten this. I appreciate every one of you that connects with these pieces and especially to those who have given them the honor of your space to live and to be seen.
In the summer of 2023 I moved into a new work and living space. I was stuck. Completely uninspired and creatively blocked. Determined to make another fresh start with my life, I woke up one morning and decided that the body of work that I have been creating since 2017 was coming to an end. But I didn’t know where I was going.
Developing a new series is not something that happens easily. It requires digging in and shutting myself off from everything. It is deeply rooted in process and materials. It is birthed exclusively from my creativity and reflects my personal history.
I have kept journals inconsistently since college. I dive into writing when it feels like I need to, but especially in times of uneasiness. For the past year I have had a consistent daily writing practice. Every morning I grab a pencil and my notebook and I write until it feels like I’m done. Some days it’s one paragraph, some days it’s seven or more pages. There isn’t always sense or logic but the words always pour out. This process gets me ready for my day. It clears the cobwebs and drains the bad energy. These days I feel like the words never end. They are a plentiful gift and so they have become my primary subject in these new works.
Once started, this series emerged quickly and is still considered in a state of development. The shifts in ideas are already apparent but still center around my initial thought process of using journal entries in my work in order to destroy them. The text is manipulated and layered throughout the page. It is pure and unedited. The words become their own unidentifiable identity and morph into beautiful abstractions. The daily transfer of thoughts and emotions onto paper is difficult and draining, but necessary. Depressive thoughts are invoked and controlled. I welcome the transfer of these emotions into new works in order to heal and in order to create. Each piece contains one legible sentence in it somewhere, giving the viewer a glimpse into that day's journal entry and subject matter. Using my emotions as my strength, these artworks will go out into the world, my feelings and thoughts hidden in plain sight.