About me

I make paintings about women, memory, resilience, and the strange things we carry with us. My work often starts with something familiar—a domestic object, a piece of fabric, a figure, a landscape, a military symbol—and then takes a left turn. I’m interested in the tension between things that are supposed to be soft and things that are expected to be strong. Embroidery, quilts, buttons, clothing, and other traditionally feminine materials become ways of talking about labor, identity, survival, and the stories women inherit and pass along.

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I’m also interested in the ridiculousness of being alive. There is grief and there is humor, sometimes in the same place. My paintings can be sentimental, but I don’t want them to be precious. I like beauty with a little grit in it, and I’m drawn to images that can hold more than one meaning at a time.

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Much of my work is rooted in personal experience, but I’m less interested in making a literal record of my life than in transforming those experiences into something other people can recognize as their own. I paint the things that stay with us: people we’ve loved, places we’ve left, identities we’ve outgrown, and the pieces of ourselves we stubbornly keep. Ultimately, I think I paint because making things is how I make sense of things.