ARTIST STATEMENT

My work begins with an unshakable pull to witness the life of the natural world. Large-scale canvases of colour-drenched nature act as narrator to my visual memory. I interpret my personal and ancestral stories of plants and the emotions they carry through shifting layers of shadow and light, jewel-toned acrylic washes, and pastel markings that build over time. Plants are a language passed on to me from my mother - once a cultivator of a wild garden in my childhood home. They are now the keeper of my mother’s memory.

In fluid rivers of pigment that spill over into the fringes of my paintings, I pour out my story onto the canvas and wield temporal influence over its shape and form, before the pigment determines its own place. My work captures poignant moments of my observations of nature - moments of intense presence that are replayed in flashes of colour, sometimes saturated and intense, other times watery and transient, fading then reappearing just as my memories do. Each canvas is in recognition of the generations that have communed with Nature before me; those that have left their imprint of hope in the landscape.

My art practice navigates difficult emotions like loss, grief, fear, doubt, and heartbreak, but what you see is my refusal to succumb to despair and my choice to turn toward hope. I return to the mistress of my memory - my mother, her closely kept teachings, her wild garden- as a resource. Embracing the wildness and hidden language of plants is how I keep her memory alive and write it into the DNA of my lived experience.

This current work connects both this ancestral inheritance and a new land of belonging. I have recently moved from my childhood home to a new place that I now cultivate and tend. After forty-five years of living with my mother’s garden, it is now time to create my own. I continue to commune with nature and this land that has witnessed generations of love and grief; land that is now gracefully holding my memories, hopes, and dreams for generations to come.