My work is heavily impacted by everyday objects, the American West, and my own lived experiences.
In quotidian things like furniture or appliances, I see the people who use them, and so, objects become a stand in for specific people and my personal experiences with them.
Along with my focus on everyday spaces and items, I make compositions that depict the vast emptiness that I associate with my home landscape of Southwestern Wyoming. These dusty wide open plains have always inspired introspection in myself. My inclusion of these apparently abandoned landscapes lends an air of liminality to each piece, which speaks to my purposeful use of a studio practice to achieve emotional closure—and to develop a psychologically appropriate outlook on my life’s past, present, and future.
I often begin creating artworks by using a Printmaking process like relief or monotype printing to create an underlying aesthetic structure. I don’t stop with just a developed print, however. Instead, I opt to spend more time with my work by drawing, cutting, pasting, and painting over top of the printed imagery until I have achieved a visual level of development which supports my complicated reflections on life and the loss inherent to living. In this way, I reject the practice of printing multiples for the sake of multiplicity, and instead focus on the power of assembling unique one of a kind works on paper which are ultimately indicative of the emotionality of lived experiences.
In addition to borrowing visual elements from works of western landscape, my practice is influenced by tropes of illustration and animation, storyboarding, comic books, urban sketching, journaling, scrapbooking, blueprint drafting, and the quotidian.
Materially speaking, I am most interested in making work that combines traditional printmaking disciplines with elements of collage, drawing, and painting.
Conceptually, I draw inspiration from Creative Nonfiction writing, American Realism, and Introspective Art.