Solid Motion

While abstract, this is very personal work.

A lot of it I just feel compelled to make, and I find myself looking backwards when writing about it, tracing back the brain crumb trails to pick out the “why”s.

For some time now I’ve hopped back and forth between painting and sculpture, with both inspiring each other. Besides repeating similar abstract shapes, when painting I like to work with transparency and layers, which echos my fascination with glass in my sculptures.

I like to push materials to their limits, and then a little further. This is most obvious in my work with glass and ceramic, where I melt sheets of glass into a ceramic form in the kiln, catching it at just the right temperature before it goes too far and breaks. This method of using heat and gravity to create unusual glass shapes began as an experiment about five years ago, and my investigation continues as I’ve honed in on the technique to go larger and incorporating steel.

I began working with watercolor on paper many years ago out of necessity, as it was easily portable without taking up much space. I grew to love the medium, because despite its unforgiving qualities (or perhaps because of them) there is always a feeling of chance and surprise. It’s a bit of a tournament between myself, the pigment and water. I graduated to working on raw canvas, using inks and fluid acrylics, so that I can create similar effects on a larger scale.

I’ve become increasingly enticed by symmetry in the last year, and this fascination has played out across my work. It makes my compositions feel more human to me, more related to the body. I’ve developed a sort of language of shapes that are sometimes influenced by the landscape around me, but more often on my interior landscape. I’m often working out my feelings around the effects of internal diseases on my reproductive system (specifically endometriosis), the process of aging, the real and imagined degradation of my femininity.

Infertility is a subject that is too often avoided, as it tends to make everyone just uncomfortable. This adds shame to the pile of isolating pains a sterile person suffers. While I personally feel like I’ve come out of the other side of this misery, there are still ghosts of it knocking around my psyche that come out in my work. There is a chunk of sadness at my core, a feeling of loss for something that never was. I often use humor and silliness to deal with these issues as a way to disarm them, combined with a search for beauty within pain.

Menopause is an even thornier topic, causing women to silently suffer these sometimes massive changes to their bodies. These things used to be something I kept tucked away, but more often I find that alluding to these personal experiences can offer connection through sharing these vulnerabilities.