Artist Statement

I make fine art prints that express the tensions around order & chaos that we experience every day. Before the global pandemic hit, we were living in a world of accelerating change. Now we are facing an ongoing crisis of racial & social inequity as we recognize the slow-moving disaster of global climate change. My work expresses these tensions through visual metaphors. Often an orderly grid of triangles or letter forms provide a background for a chaotic burst of texture. Hazy clouds of color overlap & interact with an acute triangular shape, or hide behind bold blocks of color. 

 

My larger art practice is grounded in my training in architecture & design, which are the inspiration for my printmaking. In architecture school I learned to admire the crisp, utopian high modernism of Josef & Anni Albers, Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn, as well as the everyday vernacular work of postmodernists Robert Venturi & Denise Scott Brown. My work in historic preservation helped me understand how easily the achievements of human culture can be lost, which fed my desire to contribute to that long human conversation. 

 

Creativity thrives within set boundaries, so I set rules for myself - a pattern, a color palette, a strategy for action. As I explore, I look for variations & combinations, pushing the boundaries of my rules, looking for unexpected juxtapositions, playfulness, & variety within the system I’ve set in motion. I use geometry as a generator of form using the ideas of multiples & repetition inherent in printmaking to explore creativity through variety, possibility, & surprise. I work in series, using different scales and colorways. I play with ideas to see how they work as figures in space, then as the negative space in the background, or with bright, high-keyed color, then as muted tones. I take ideas apart and flip them around, using symmetry and mirroring to get a new point of view.