My work focuses on the issue of containment – the
human desire for the safety of enclosure and structure vs. the terror of
possible entrapment. My paintings depict an array of containers - grids,
buildings, eggs, spheres, circles and squares and suggest that a container can
protect, imprison or do both.
My work often veers back and forth between competing
dualities – abstraction vs. photorealism, loose vs. tight, contained
vs.unrestrained, geometric vs. biomorphic shapes, motherhood vs. childhood,
square vs. circle, creation vs. destruction. The Tension of Opposites is an
ongoingexploration of these and
other dualities that creep into my work.
Painting,
for me, is a slow gradual emergence of form into space. Using palette knives,
nails, combs, rags -I push, pull, dig and scrape - searching for layers
underneath as I continue to add
more paint on top of layers. This way of working always allows me to make
surprising discoveries, which for me is an essential part of the painting
process. My paintings emerge gradually and only after much struggle, not unlike
the way a person’s sense of self emerges itself over the course of a lifetime.