Artist Statement
My work returns again and again to centering, not as an escape from chaos, but as an active response to it. That practice began in my garden, where I go when life gets loud, and where looking closely at a single flower brings me back to balance.
My flowers invite universal questions of existence and purpose in their quest for survival, eventual senescence, and rebirth. I pair the very small with the very large, the center of a bloom with the shape of a galaxy, because I believe the same patterns repeat at every scale. What sustains a garden also sustains the cosmos and our own communities: interconnection, and the harmony it takes to thrive.
In my paintings, I build abstract underpaintings inspired by images of deep space, then glaze the flower over them in thin, transparent layers. Garden and galaxy become a visual dialogue, each layer distinct, yet inseparable from what surrounds it. I see that as a fitting metaphor for the open exchange I believe is essential to our collective survival.
My work moves fluidly between media, from painting and digital imagery to video, sound, and installation, choosing whatever each idea calls for. Each offers a different way of paying attention. Painting carries the slow mark of the hand. The computer is simply another medium. Left alone, it is only a piece of sculpture. Installation envelops a person through multiple senses.
For years I worked on instinct. Neuroaesthetics, the study of how art and beauty affect the brain and body, has since given me language for what I sensed all along: slowing down to look closely can restore our balance. That is what I want my work to offer, a place to pause, look, and find center again.