My work reflects my experiences in the world, and painting is a valuable process for my self reflection. It slows me down and allows me to see the world more fully and clearly.
In my most recent body of work I combine two worlds I have inhabited: cheerleading, which I did competitively from ages seven to eighteen; and painting, which has become my obsession since. My work is generated from the contrast between athletics and aesthetics, the public and the personal, being seen and seeing, the group and the individual, and the 'ditzy' and the deeply meaningful.
I start with photographs, gleaned from the internet, friends’ cell phones, family albums and from a range of print media. It seems the perfect source, as my entire life has been documented through photographs. The cheerleading images bring back the feelings and physical sensations of those competitions, and I use that to approach the work. The photograph is also a flattened abstracted place to begin thinking about painting.
Emotional memory informs my color palette and mark-making, I paint with the quickness, repetition, and weightlessness of performance combined with the nervous energy of anticipation. I am interested in the relationship between representation and abstraction, the passage where paint appears to have lost control, and in the next breath, reorganizes into form.