Artist Statement

My work is rooted in personal narrative and the image-making tradition I was born into. As a child growing up in a family of nine, surrounded by cameras, snapshots, home movies, and reproductions of Renaissance paintings, I came to understand life through pictures. From an early age, I felt the slippage between the personal and the universal, between the sacred and the mundane. The merging of family photo albums with historical archetypes, particularly the maternal Madonna figure, formed the foundation of my visual language.

My current body of work is shaped by grief, transformation, and an ongoing investigation of identity. In Tall Blonde and Good Blonde, I explore how the female form is consumed, dismembered, and reconstituted, engaging with ideas of beauty, rage, and resilience in a world that continues to legislate female bodies. Inside Out is a meditation on bodily experience, gendered shame, and the porousness of self. It poses questions about identity as something felt, formed, and perhaps, unfixed.

Autobiography runs throughout these works, often in conversation with art historical references. POW draws on glossy fashion ads from my adolescence, while DNA distills my lifelong effort to reconcile inherited identity with self-determined expression. In Three Marys, I collapse the grief of my own mother, Mary Jane, with that of religious icons — Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary — into one knotted, tender form. It is a lamentation not only for personal loss but for the collective suffering of mothers across time and place.

Several paintings reflect my effort to process the death of my mother. In 20/20, I pair my childhood self with a cubist rendering of her from a Niagara Falls honeymoon snapshot, a site whose overwhelming natural force mirrors the emotional intensity of her absence. Shampoo in Brazil and Bushwacker continue this reckoning, capturing a shifting sense of self after loss. They nod to mythic quests and personal history alike, using gestures of hair, water, and landscape as metaphors for memory and metamorphosis.

During the opening of On Her Own Terms at the Fitchburg Art Museum, a woman stood before one of my works and cried. She told me she was a hairstylist, blind in one eye, and that for the first time she felt seen — her complexity, her history, her internal contradictions mirrored back at her. She vowed, right there, to live more honestly. That moment reminded me why I do this work. My paintings strive to unearth what lies beneath the surface, to give form to sensation, contradiction, and becoming. They are portraits not only of myself but of all those who’ve been asked to contort their identities to survive.