My work is rooted in two foundational sources: the appreciation of nature I gained by spending countless hours as a child on my grandmother's property in the Wisconsin woods, and the nurturing relationships with the family who raised me. The woods provided both a foundational sensory education and a special sense of curiosity surrounding the natural world. Whereas the care, experience, and presence of the women in my family shaped my core understanding of identity and community. While these early experiences remain present in my work, they are filtered through memory, time, and sensation rather than depicted directly. I am interested in the gap between a lived experience and the fragmented way it is remembered. It is within this space that I explore how our identities are formed by the environments we inhabit and the experiences that shape us.

I work primarily with oil paint, developing the composition through a slow, layered process of glazing, washes, and reworking that builds visual depth, tension, and spatial complexity. My approach to painting is a negotiation between intention and intuition. While I begin with a loose concept, the work’s evolution is guided by a direct, intuitive dialogue with the developing surface. This process becomes an excavation, through which shapes, figures, and forgotten memories gradually surface. Oil paint’s versatility and forgiveness allow me to revisit and refine areas as the work develops. Through abstraction, color, and this dense layering, I construct dream-like visual fields inspired by nature. The layers themselves suggest history, as forms emerge and recede within the painted surface. I use abstraction to recreate the specific mood of a memory or place. My color choices are subjective, meant to build upon a sensation, creating an emotional atmosphere that invites the viewer to pause and reflect. The paintings ask the viewer to consider not a specific past, but the complex, fallible, and deeply personal nature of how we construct our own histories.