I Have Considered the Lilies (How Sad, How Lovely)

This body of work, created at the University of Iowa, hinges between recognizable form and dreamt abstraction. The paintings, ceramic objects, and monotype prints scratch at the sublime while feeding directly from earthly reference. They accumulate in their arrangements – allowing material, color, and texture to communicate emotional experience through hue and form association. The surfaces give a sense of autonomy in the paintings, as if they’ve constructed themselves, while the color palette seems to be plucked directly from a distant childhood. Pattern and form often reference one another as mirages – connecting a formal narrative throughout the work. The compositions reference dreams, apparitions, memories, joys, anxieties that connect lived experience to a brighter, more virtuosic visual codex. My work aims to reveal experiences oscillating just underneath the skin of waking life, allowing the mind to dawdle between sweetness and despair.