Artist Statement 3

My work rests in the space between response to site and response to material. The elements explored in my work are therefore two-fold: How can the sensory experience of a site be transmuted into the sensory language of a painting? How do the material conditions of the painting—in the sparest sense, consisting of paint and surface—inform the nature of this transmutation?

Gesture is one of the key ways in which I mediate between site and painting. I begin work by visiting a site. I spend time there, and develop a relationship to that place, body to body. When I face a painting, I use gestures that mirror my actions at the site.

My paintings are often large, physically active surfaces that have a direct relationship to the size of my body. This scale allows me to work with and against the painting in a way that relates to my how I enter landscape, as another body in direct relationship to my body. Because gesture is important to my work, I have often been asked what my relationship is to abstract expressionist painters, and to the specific presentation of masculinity supplied by painters such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. I reject these contexts, just as I reject the question: What is the mark of the feminine within my work?

I ask: why must my work have this clear dichotomy? Why can I not locate my work within a different frame—within a frame that is painting, influenced by performance and sculpture, by paths taken by the body and the eye, rather than illusory roles?

I choose to locate my work in the context of painters such as Joan Mitchell or Magali Lara not because they are female, associated with feminist painting, and thus “the mark of the feminine,” but rather because I find the combination of painting and performative gesture and mark to be a generative means of working.

The physical condition of the paint and the manner in which it is added or erased from the surface has the power to both clarify and confuse a painting’s reading, often at the same time. I combine the practice of mark-making gesture discussed above with different paint processes in order to form each painting’s composition. Recently, I have begun working with a variety of surfaces, including birch panel, paint-grip metal sheeting, and polished stainless steel sheeting. The revelations, intrusions and reflections of these substrates into the painted surface serve to disrupt my own assumptions, such as the preeminence of image over object within a painting.