Artist Statement

 My art is informed by a religious childhood in Texas. I attended a Southern Baptist school that taught that the Endtimes were near. When I got older, I became obsessed with Catholic art which united piety, eroticism, and violence in single images. While no longer religious, I confront religiosity, gender roles, and human and animal suffering and sacrifice in my work.

While studying at Cooper Union, I found myself drawn to these themes as expressed in narrative medieval art. My interest is the relationship between the figurative, the miniature, and the devotional. Prompted by the medieval and early renaissance crowd scenes created by Heironymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, I began to explore the tradition of miniaturization of imagery and amplification of detail in the context of religiously symbolic paintings. Studying works like The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Triumph of Death, I came to see how the vortices of figures were capable of creating both anxiety and contemplation in the viewer.

 Narratives of physical sacrifice are a frequent subject of my work, but another aspect of my paintings is the physical endurance required to make them. Although the final product of my process is a painting, there is a endurance-based, performative aspect to creating the works that is inspired by the work of feminist artists like Ana Mendieta. With each new work, I create new parameters related to the size of the piece, the number of figures, and the level of detail. Often, I am pushing up against the physical limits of what I can create with my own body, whether it’s by using very small scales (extreme miniaturization and repetition) or very large scales (such as my piece, Martyrs, which is 30 feet by 5 feet). I harmonize the content of my work, drawn from religion and often telling stories of women and female bodies, with the process of my work, which requires my own physical endurance and boundary pushing and deconstructing the traditional binary between large-scale works by men and miniature works by and for women.