Current Statement 2026

I make paintings of staged scenes. I place the figure among inflatable pool toys and fragments of idyllic landscape—spaces designed to signify leisure, but which quietly intensify estrangement.

The scenarios are not arbitrary. They are sly reenactments of events and relationships from my own life, though I am not interested in presenting literal narrative. I anthropomorphize the animal pool toys, allowing them to stand in as proxies for people, forces, or emotional positions. In this way, decorative systems become psychological ones.

What interests me is the charge that occurs when a painted scene feels both artificial and recognizable. I want the image to remain open-ended, but to carry a pressure of recognition for the viewer: a sense that something intimate, absurd, threatening, or devotional is being staged.

It has always seemed uncanny to me that ancient tropes of martyrdom, lamentation, transfiguration, heroism, and malevolence appear so plainly in contemporary domestic life. Greco-Roman mythology and European religious painting seem to leak through the layers of history, reappearing in scenes of family, motherhood, leisure, and emotional survival.

I am also attentive to the language used to discipline mothers: “martyr mommy,” “tiger mom,” and other names that turn care, control, sacrifice, or intensity into accusation. Often this critique comes not only from the outside, but from within the ranks of mothers themselves, and from within me. The paintings hold that contradiction: the mother as protector, tyrant, martyr, performer, animal, ornament, and witness.