Artist Statement

 

   On the eve of summer, a little girl took a walk.  The sky was alight with a strange cloud, and she came upon a talisman, who showed her where the darkness was, and how to eat it. The road became dark and confusing. There was no one around, no voices or chittering, and in the silence there was an eerie peace.  The darkness in her belly beckoned her forward, and she arrived at a place to rest.  She dreamed of amorphous beings with no faces, alarming and terrible, for their masks were heartbreaking. They told her to continue on the road. She met other children on her travels, and collected their souls in a little basket.  When she reached the river, she released all of the darkness and all of the souls, to become stars.

 

I’ve been working on these drawings while revisiting boxes of old photographs, sitting with the images, looking at them with a sense of hindsight and sadness. I look at the photos for a while, and then put them aside and draw.  The thick paper allows me to rework the image repeatedly, scraping and adding, creating layers and texture and color, and over time, the colors create an atmosphere, with the perception of an environment just shimmering outside the bounds of my vision.  Something new comes, and the image takes shape. The beings in these works are almost fluid, in a dreamlike space and their own story.  It’s unlike anything from reality, as though walking through a lens or a mirror to another world. They are memories and not memories, existing in an immersive space where things that are not real come together to tell one part of an experience. Or maybe another story altogether. I wonder at the strange details in them, and what they tell me about the world that they are a part of.  

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