Artist Statement

Sticky, summer heat pulls sweat from the brow-but it also gives the trees their thousand shades of green. Down by the river, thousand year old bluffs look down on us. Hundreds of feet tall, they echo everyone on the water: the blue herons, the kingfishers, the fishermen. In the woods, cicadas make a high rasp that gets used to until it’s gone, and if you’re lucky, a pileated woodpecker might make its presence known as it drums through a dead hickory. Stay until dusk, and an old grandmother doe might peer out from the saplings to get a sense of your intent. At night, a new bird graces my ears. It’s sharp and soft at the same time. It separates itself from the other hidden creatures, yet remains invisible all the same. They’d start at dusk, singing the moon into the sky, but keep on as the stars came out and comets burned overhead to make the wishes we’d made come true. Summer nights meant open windows, and the whip-poor-wills and bullfrogs became my lullaby.
My artwork combines memories of the natural places I’ve lived in and visited with the wildlife of these areas. I often try to combine aspects of memory and nature into my artwork, while also utilizing bright colors to draw the viewer and give them some vibrancy. Some of my artwork dances with the thought of how our forests behave when we’re not there. I often wonder how both the spaces we’ve left alone, and the places we’ve transformed acted before we colonized these lands. I think of how large the trees were, and how diversified the ecosystems must have been, and how they had been cherished and treated as equals for thousands of years.
I also bring memories of my childhood into my artwork-specifically growing up in the Ozark mountains. That place has always felt unique to me, as it is often overlooked and seemingly closed off from the world. To me, the Ozarks have been a treasured place, specifically her lands and her fauna. Growing up in the rural South, I have been drawn to stories and superstitions, all while inevitably cultivating a closer relationship with the outdoors, as the people who live rurally must coincide with the crawfish, catfish, woodpeckers, mosquitos, and copperheads that make a life just as important as their own.
I am a multi-disciplinary artist that paints with oils, gouache, and acrylic, while also employing screen-printing, woodblock-printing, and pyrography as a relief-printing technique. While referencing avians and cervids in my work, I also try to incorporate natural materials-such as using leaves as stamps, or tree-bark as wood-blocks. I want my artwork to revel in the magic of a forest, and simultaneously invoke an understanding of the cyclical quality of reciprocity in nature.