STATEMENT
My paintings on paper move beyond traditional abstraction and incorporate all manner of found and fabricated materials. They are paintings and also intricate systems of display that house arranged bits of scrappy artifacts. When I make my paintings, I think of them as simultaneously surface, object and ritual. I see myself as a collector populating the paper’s surface with poured paint, discarded scraps, beads, string, sequins, stickers and components of my children’s abandoned drawings. Through my formalization of throwaway items, I suggest the range of potential within all things, big or small, high or low.
Many materials that I am drawn to are of lowly origins, mass-produced remnants that are resuscitated within my paintings. Over the course of developing a painting, small, seemingly insignificant moments accumulate to both form and disrupt larger patterns. The intricate cutouts, paired with gestural, painted marks, create an unsettling tension. Disguised X’s and O’s indicate hugs and kisses, but also uncertainty. I intentionally place intuitive gestures next to laborious hand-cut cutouts, as a means of exploring the tension between order and disorder, care and irreverence.
I intend for my paintings to uphold a sense of mystery and unpredictability. The repeated shapes and patterns are often on the verge of collapse. Nodding to textiles, as well as the nuanced history of abstract painting, I am interested in the pleasure of ordering—finding joy through creating patterns and assigning significance to odd items. Gardening, astrology and geology are of particular interest, as are the ways cultures have historically kept track of time, through rituals, calendars, mark making and writing.
🖤🖤🖤
The aesthetic of ruin, and the search for meaning within this aesthetic context, is one catalyst for my collaborative work with my husband, Brian Barr. As a collaborative team, we are interested in visually compressing the past, present, and potential future(s) of Western civilization. Focusing on the shifting cultural significance of ideas, objects and images, we consider Western culture’s objects and images as ephemera from our historic moment. Imagining a world where today’s glut of images has become functionless elements within a deteriorating landscape, we create a vision of a potential future for objects and images.
As if in a dream, we find refuge from our culture of visual over-saturation by digging deeper beneath the images themselves. Through cutting, layering, collaging, scanning, printing, painting and weaving, we create intersections between digital and analogue, depth and surface, virtual and actual. A methodology of upcycling is essential to our practice; we reuse and modify our own images and materials in multiple installations, examining the relationship between deterioration and value. Navigating between optimism and pessimism we pose the question: are we witnessing a site of new beginnings or sifting through the rubble after collapse?