STATEMENT

My work explores memory, childhood, and ritual. I investigate experience and imagination to create surreal, escapist environments in multiple media that approach past trauma through symbolic intermediaries illuminating despair and hope. Figures emerge from flora and fauna remembered from when I was a child along the Hudson River, the Palisades, and Inwood Hill Park. Repeating motifs of birds, butterflies, unicorns, forest imagery, flattened perspective figures, and jeweled objects are juxtaposed with abstractions of memory that celebrate joyful moments and memorialize painful episodes. Recollections of the Cloisters inspire references to medieval ornamentation and symbolism of ritual objects in Jewish and Catholic traditions. My ceramic works are narratives in carved low reliefs, often coated in painterly underglazes and glazes. Paintings are encrusted in layers of beads, rhinestones, jewelry, glitter, and patterning, reminiscent of exploring my mother’s jewelry box as a child, investigating the complex and timeless experiences that women share in relationships between parenting and in their youth.