ARTIST STATEMENT

From a young age, I was impacted by my parent’s support of my creative artistic pursuits. Their encouragement allowed me to pursue my dreams and talents as a practicing artist. Having worked in several different mediums, each one has deeply influenced my visual vocabulary and creative expression.

In the last ten years, my luminescent encaustic paintings focused on the vessel as a voluptuous form. While painting in encaustic, I started creating wallpaper backgrounds utilizing color, texture and imagery. The concept eventually inspired me to create cyanotype prints from my garden flowers, most recently pushing the scale of the images larger. Thus, developing a dialect to frame or situate the dimensional vessel.

For all of us, life has changed since the isolation of COVID-19. The course of my art practice has changed too. During the lockdown, I turned to flowers from my garden and captured their beauty through photography. This exploration brought the calm and joy I feel when working and cultivating plantings-resulting in intimate observation of lush floral prints.

My process involves alchemy, nature, artistic license, technology, and timing. The current cyanotype prints continue to bring a new perspective as I expand my vision into creating a range in depth of color and compositions using my garden flowers. This is the fourth year documenting the cycle of seasonal blooms in a uniquely beautiful and sometimes mysterious format.

Every year the new prints challenge me, giving me a gift of beauty and an element of surprise. The shades of blue and soft white make the images appear both contemporary and vintage, contrasting variations of light and dark. Each print is an individual piece of art kissed by the sun and marked by the inclusions within the unique lightweight Sekishu paper it’s printed on. This paper is strong enough to take the sensitizing solution and wash out once exposed to the sun. The magic begins as the positive image emerges before your eyes, producing a beautiful print with a lustrous sheen and silky finish.