My early works were large-scale atmospheric abstract paintings. I have always embraced color, and was told by a professor once that my color choices bordered on obscenity. I still don't really have any clue what that really means, but I know that in reaction to that, I tried to think of ways to make my work more obnoxious. I started working with metallic spray paints, and encrusting my paintings in glitter. I have always been attracted to the tasteless and tacky.
My work has since manifested itself as fabric collage. I spend my ideation time working my way through fabric warehouses, estate sales, and thrift stores, searching for materials that both attract and repulse me.
I am a compulsive list-maker. I stockpile lists of vocabulary words, always searching for opposites and contradictions within these lists, and I build my work accordingly. In the same way that my work is a chain of words, my work is also a conglomeration of pieces of silk and muslin held together by thread and straight pins.
Comfort, warmth, hot, cold, harmony, discord, sexy, ugly, dirty, precious, abject, clean, luxurious, tasteless, tacky, excessive, stretchy, smooth, compressed, loose, tight, and bunched, nouns and verbs and adjectives. I use these words to construct the often-ambiguous meaning of my work.
Currently I look to the work of Paul McCarthy, Nancy Davidson, Mark Bradford, Annette Messager, Sylvie Fleury, and Yayoi Kusama. All of these artists deal with various levels of dirt and grime, taste and tastelesness, and excesses of all of these things.
