My work depicts women in my life, loyal to the materiality of paint and disloyal to the referential images. My goal is to make these women take up as much of the canvas as possible, faces usurping the politicized female body. Zoomed in, cropped tight, invading the subject, invading the viewer. I was once asked if it is possible to paint the portrait of a woman, as a woman myself, without it, figuratively, becoming a self-portrait. I believe the answer is no. 

My process is centered around physicality, the clawing and swiping of paint and performing the traditionally masculine trade of laying tile. Inquiring how I can combine a material that allows such freedom with one that is so stringent. How I can make one exist in the world of the other. I build the faces from swaths of color and with as much reckless abandon as I can muster. I believe there is something about pursuing womanhood in an unreserved and unrelenting manner that defies binary, crosses over into the animalistic. I try to become animal in my mark-making.

When using tile as substrate for the paintings, resolving the marks requires me to take the smears of color, disengage them, and then recontextualize them to the point of abstraction. I rearrange, making each tile its own individual composition, and then part of a larger community. The work using tile is my examination of sterility and containment, how those enduring punishments have been and continue to be imposed onto women. How they can so often be self-imposed. I draw from research on the idea of the container, the historical institutionalization of women, and women artists who refuse to depict women as docile.

My practice is an attempt for me to make sense of the senseless. It is my search for clues to answer the unanswerable questions of what it means to be a woman, and to make art as a woman.