I am a project-based artist, whose work spans studio practice to community engaged projects. The through-line in all my work, though, is rooted in painting, drawing, imagery, and metaphor.
As a young child, I loved looking through the family dictionary. Embedded in its definitions, etymologies, synonyms, and antonyms, a linear rendering accompanied each word and engaged me endlessly. In elementary school, my first-grade teacher had us include drawings with each of our vocabulary lessons. I am drawn to visual and verbal metaphor. One image stands for itself and something else. One word denotes other meanings. One material holds its reference while alluding to something beyond. Is this an illusion or magic?
SOUTHERN
Although I was born in the South and have worked in the south for most of my adult life, I did not think of myself as a “southern artist” until about ten years ago. Up to that point, southern artists seemed to me to be defined by their subject matter, which either had an outsider/folk theme, was craft-based, or was a narrative in the southern tradition. My work is none of these things. If anything, I railed against being defined as “southern.” But we all grow-up at some point, and I got past my southern guilt and denial. I realized that held within the very process of my work and its overarching intent are the facts of my being southern, female, raised within the traditions of steel magnolias in a region where history permeates the impact of the present.
The South is known for beauty pageants and matriarchal family dynamics. “Steel magnolias” are not simply pretty but have power. Beauty has been a guiding principle of my work. I strive to make beautiful work, work that uses beauty as a cover for seductive strength: beauty to attract and complexity to sustain observation. Even the subject matter of many of my artworks examine the fantasy construction of beauty.
For me, also, the southern tradition speaks to the south’s layered/checkered presence: a presence of the past, a layering of the old south with the new, an awareness of old social patterns and new attempts to overcome them. From grounding in the colonial days, to the ever-painful civil war legacy, and to the pubescent “new south,” the south’s stance has one foot in the past and one in the present. When I was young, I desired to flee this past /present dichotomy, now I relish its richness. I find, too, I embrace dichotomy as an operative in creating the layers in my artwork. I am not interested in simply painting straight images; rather, it is the scraping through current efforts to reveal the original and the layering of new attempts on the old that create my paintings.
The subject matter of my career’s work, although not uniquely southern, does indeed reference issues of living in contemporary southern society. Issues of religion, race, politics, and female identity have all figured in my paintings. Many contemporary artists share similar focuses in their work, and they also employ layering of images and patterns, examination of consumerist society, aim for attractive work, etc. Yet, my work does not look like it was made in LA or Chicago. I and my artwork are a product of where I was raised and where I reside—this surprises me in its inescapability.
PAINTING
I am interested in illusions, in things not being quite what they seem. I am attracted to painting because it allows me to create an illusion and simultaneously reveal the means of its production. Oil painting’s wet viscosity allows for ongoing shifting of structure; it does not have to be “either/or,” “on/off,” “0/1.” I prefer to use paint to maximize this characteristic– its ability to both make an image and revert to material.
I believe paintings’ most effective role in our contemporary experience is as an object of contemplation. Since I believe in paintings as objects to be examined, in their entirety, over time, I try to make work that has beauty to attract and complexity to sustain observation. I see this as an antidote to our quick swipe digital era.
As the pictorial function of painting has been replaced with more efficient photographic and digital capture and dissemination, it is painting’s very physicality that is critical. The nuanced, dimensional, touch of oil paint is a sensitive record of the human hand in a moment of time, captured in a way that is palpable, visual, and enduring. This is a somewhat romantic view, as it gives a degree of primacy to painting’s corporeal existence — a valuing of the body present, a “feminized’ artifact.
And, there is an inherent distrust of this embodiment. Physicality? Touch? Object of gaze? Object of desire? Egad! This romantic view is balanced by the need of the hand to be rooted in the present, to be a part of our contemporary experience.
While there is always recognizable imagery in my paintings, it is the image’s capacity to operate metaphorically which is the subject matter of my artwork. As imagery, materials, and metaphor interplay, things are often not quite what they seem. Figures raise Pygmalian-esque questions of transformation; lovely interiors, on closer consideration, lead to disquieting seduction; wallpaper details, luscious statuary, give way to recognition of issues of power; obsolete sailing ships shiver with aspects of all our contemporary relationships.
PROJECTS
My movement out into the public sphere for community-based projects has been an extension of my studio practice and an antidote to the hermetic aspects of being a painter. Engagement with the public outside of my studio practice is an intentional through-line, from years dedicated to teaching painting to beginners, to working in public spaces to create free exchange between audience and artist. Public input and stories shared serve as subject matter and inspiration for my artworks. Both paintings and my projects aim to attract individuals to stay and observe, either through direct participation in a project, and or through the enticement of visual pleasure.
The interplay with metaphor continues in the project work through encounters with unexpected juxtapositions between materials, context, and content. Seeds planted in large-scale words on abandoned commercial construction sites grow and speak to the landscape and the commuter traffic. Candle smoke creates drawings on eggs, “candled” to reveal an illusion of what is contained within. Honey drips from disembodied gloves on a historical Moravian site. Paper “dolls and coloring books” are portraits of a community. Metaphor is in the materials and the imagery conjured in relationship to the context in which they are experienced.
SERIES
“-SHIPS”
For this series I developed artworks that use the explorative process of oil painting to reveal and consider the image of -ship(s) as a visual metaphor of our contemporary state of being. Throughout this project, I collect a multitude of ship images from wide-ranging sources such as museum archives, playgrounds, Netflix TV shows, liquor bottles, and “junktique” shops. A simple yet complex image, easy to overlook yet surprisingly ubiquitous, a wooden sailing ship prompts a multitude of historical and contemporary references. These references can have various associations, a ship as: a trademark for exploration or for colonialism; a nostalgic image of intrepid endeavors or of obsolescence; an image of the innocence of a lullaby or of the excesses of “Pirates of the Caribbean”.
I believe that painting’s power is in its capacity to serve as a contemplative artifact of our contemporary existence. In looking to current events, phrases such as “at sea”, “sailing into unknown territory”, “knocked the wind out of our sails” float to the surface. And, when we look to our language structure, we employ “-ship” as a modifying suffix, defined as “the state, or condition, of being something”.Whether considering, for example, citizen-ship, relation-ship, dictator-ship, censor-ship, friend-ship, the viewer can bring to the experience of the artwork their own associations, over time.
My “-ships in a bottle” community project was workshopped through the outreach programs to various community groups and visitors to the exhibition SHIP/SHAPE. Playing off the concept of “a ship in a bottle” as well as “a message in a bottle”, my project invites participants to consider an important “____-ship” in their lives: ownership, friendship, censorship, authorship, etc., for example. Provided with scrolls of paper and glass bottles, participants create messages in a bottle about this “_____-ship,” and then seal it in the small, corked bottle, for safe keeping. The participants can contribute to a public installation display or keep their own “__-ship in a bottle,” as I believe in the process as one of free exchange. The contributed “__-ship in a bottle,” is attached to a netted grid in a public window front, both catching light and curiosity. At the end of the project, members of the public are free to take home a “-ship in the bottle”, a treasure found.
The Coloring Book portfolio and Paper Doll series
The Coloring Book portfolio, and the Paper Doll series within this portfolio, emerged from my interest in harnessing the detached coolness of digital processes (from photo, to scan, to Photoshop, to print) in order to generate a drawing to be printed for my paintings. The digital print I seek provides a linear rendering that is neither a digital trace nor a hand-drawn gesture, but a hybrid between the two. This quality is a subtlety, a movement between binary and non-binary, that is echoed again in the relationships between the gestural, indeterminate quality of oil painting and the determined topology of the digital rendering. This dialogue between fixed/mutable, intention/accident, machine made/handmade, binary/non-binary, certain/uncertain has always informed my artistic practice.
The Coloring Book portfolio and the Paper Doll series is certainly a tongue-in-cheek reference to child’s play. The paper doll reference is to the format, media, and subject of these paintings. These are relatively large paintings and digital print hybrids, created on sheets of paper, sourced from a 50-yard roll. The paper provides a structural ease for changing scale and impact; it, quite literally, can be cut up and added to. The paper also conveys an undercurrent of informality or, more insidiously, of disposability. The digitally generated line drawing is a further reference to a coloring book, a surface designed to force the recognition of, if not the reconciliation within, the conflict between free agency and external control.
The Paper Doll Series are images of individual women engaged in simple acts of traditional domestic labor: folding laundry, watering, digging, etc. These acts, simple, essential, by hand, are my visual and conceptual focus. The grand traditions of these acts in art addressing issues of class and gender provide a given framework that underlies a more dominant interest in examination of loss of hand and a loss of simple agency.
Interiors Series
For over a decade, I examined fantasies presented in popular magazines. The largest series from this work was based on photographs of interiors from high-end shelter magazines (Architectural Digest, Nest, etc.) These interiors present us with a fantasy of materialist beauty. These commercial images are compelling subjects for my paintings because they reveal much about our consumptive desires. I am interested in what these fantasies reveal upon closer inspection and in what is veiled in seduction.
Over time, my work shifted emphasis from more formal concerns of the interior space towards an increased focus on the contents of the interiors themselves. “Virginal” portraits, “exotic” bric- a-brac, male statuary with excessive musculature, colonial plantation wall-paper, etc., are “hidden” images. Used for decorative purposes, these images and their connotations are overlooked within the glamour and luxury of the fantastic rooms. My paintings foreground these figures and their hidden worlds in an increasingly direct way. I am aware that in choosing to create beautiful paintings from the images of these interiors, I am creating “fantasies” that are “luxury items”. I aim, though, to celebrate the visual pleasure of my medium while also acknowledging the mechanics behind its various illusions.
