artist statement

I paint in oil and acrylic with sensuous mark-making that preserves traces of gesture. My work is grounded in the naturalistic rendering of light on materials such as glass, drapery, and flesh. In this series, I use figures based on fashion dolls as artificial avatars of womanhood.

As a bisexual and nonbinary artist, I explore my unease with the beautiful-object role associated with womanhood. I portray dolls retrieved from my childhood home—posing them to play up seductive beauty, but depicting their joints as a stark reminder of artificiality. Tension arises from an interplay of realness and falseness, highlighted by visible brushstrokes.

Wilderness, garden, and boudoir settings reveal themselves on further looking to be miniature dioramas. Ambiguities of scale and distance, and gazes that imply sapphic longing, cast figures as apparitions in dream, memory, or wish. 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 balance these conflicting visions; frank observation vies with remnants of the impossible endeavor to bring the dolls to life. The malleability of the paint and my subjective choice behind each brushstroke create a blur between lifeless plastic and animate figure.