ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a Los Angeles based mixed media artist, arts educator, and MFA candidate who uses human figure as a substrate for abstraction. I find that abstracting from the natural contours of human form allows me to remove binaries and societal body standards. By depicting bodies interacting with themselves, other bodies, and imagined spaces, I am attempting to explore the way I relate to my own body, interpersonal intimacy, and the environments I inhabit at given moments. I am largely inspired by gestural abstraction and surrealism which has led me to pair illusion with mark making. Combining thin glazes with gestural marks creates translucent overlapping forms that have a sense of motion and inner connectivity. Drips are a natural result of the watered down painting method. They become a gesture and a break from the dimensional illusion of the paintings. My sculptures are impermeable variations of my paintings. Sculpting achieves a physicality and dimensional quality that painting can not. This relationship is important to my practice because mark making allows me to explore gesture and transparency, while sculpting brings my abstracted figures to a physical state in the real world. Although there is a duality in the modes of art making, there is also an alliance. My two dimensional work often acts as blueprints for my three dimensional work. The sculptures later become additional references for abstraction in my paintings.