Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

My work explores abstraction as a site which emerges through material and process. Working with thick impasto oil, ceramic and carved surfaces, I build and rupture paint until it becomes sculptural — layered, fractured, and rebuilt. I am interested in accumulation as memory and surface as a record of experience. Influenced by feminist abstraction and quiet stillness my paintings oscillate between structure and eruption, restraint and excess. I treat paint as a physical substance that can be pushed, gouged, and reworked, allowing gesture to register as both emotional and architectural. Through repetition, density, and luminous color, I construct hybrid forms that blur the boundary between painting and object. These works function as narrative fields rather than illustrations — spaces where tension, vulnerability, and transformation unfold materially. I invite viewers to slow down and consider how abstraction can be structured around sensory information.

While At Headlands

During my residency at Headlands Center for the Arts, I will create a series of large-scale abstract paintings that approach landscape as language rather than image. I will construct expansive surfaces through dense accumulations of oil, investigating “ugly beauty,” quiet rupture, and maximalism. I will then carve, scrape, and sand into these surfaces so that meaning emerges through revision, exposure, and repair.

Responding to the coastal fog and shifting Pacific light, I will translate atmosphere into material. These softened passages will allow abstraction to hover near figuration without resolving. Wax skins will hold and diffuse light, while embedded ceramic fragments interrupt the painted field as moments of punctuation—breath within density, pause within excess.

This project investigates abstraction as material syntax: built, erased, and rewritten through pressure, touch, and time. Rather than depicting place, the work records transformation—how landscape is felt, revised, and embodied through process.