artist statement

I paint dreamlike vignettes that conjure tenderness and yearning, using oil and acrylic on canvas at a small scale. Through sensuous mark-making, I preserve traces of gesture in order to invoke tactility, with its connotations of proximity and intimacy. In my current project, I capture fashion dolls retrieved from my childhood home as avatars of womanhood.

I pose the dolls in dioramas of wilderness, garden, or boudoir settings, which I construct from fabric, plastic plants, mirrors, styrofoam, and cardboard. Painting from observation and imagination, I create a sense of space and life while preserving uncanny and artificial characteristics. Tension arises from this interplay of real and fake: despite the dolls’ stark joints and plastic sheen, their tender gestures and gazes imply interiority, agency, and sapphic desire. As solitary figures, the dolls command the gaze, playing up their role as display-objects; as pairs, they are absorbed in moments of tender touch or yearning across distance. The dolls embody a troubling idea of womanhood as surface and glamour to be enjoyed by the eye, but were also the Muses I treasured as a child. I repurpose them to illuminate this reductive vision of womanhood. The tired narratives of binary gender can only go so far toward individual self-fulfillment.