Artist Statement

This work is something about the maternal, fertility, absorption, the eternal. Pulling from memories and experiences as a mother, daughter and woman, I create installations which include living and ceramic sculpture, painting, and photography in order to examine attachment to place, gender-expression, familial and cultural ties, and motherhood. Watercolors on yupo, grow-lights, the color pink, photographs of fruit at various stages of ripeness, clay sculptures of pregnant bodies, seedling plants in clay vessels surrounding a vegetal virgin Mary, evoke the complex realities surrounding caring and tending for oneself and others in today’s world. I use this work to redefine my autonomy in relation to the all-consuming, all-absorbing occupation of motherhood. Especially in a time filled with reproductive anxiety, this work evokes a sense of understanding, comradery and empathy.

I center both beauty and decay as an ambivalent homage: to absorption and non-absorption, ripeness and decay, tenuous young life and withering age. The grow light shines on the often-oversimplified, often-contradictory, bittersweet dualities inherent to motherhood. In this way, I seek an honest framework from which to address and inhabit motherhood within my family and myself.

non-absorption, fertility, the eternal, 2023
collage, watercolor, soap on yupo, dead pomegranate fruits and branches
30 x 40 inches