Artist Statement

 
Body and Cloth has been my subject for many years. Either cloth is in concert with the body or cloth takes on its own alchemical dance of transformation. With the bodies I mean to capture something of the significance and strength of character that has been gained by lasting through uncertainties and vulnerabilities within the forces of life and death. The bodies and cloth are meant to perform similar conditions metaphorically as they knot and loosen in emotional tying up and releasing. I see the folds as sensuous, turning in on themselves, taking unique, never to happen again forms, mimicking how each person’s composite traits and qualities are distinctly their own.

 Most recently I’m painting the cloth with only the impression of the body. I mean the images to portray intimate records of physical presence, beings that were there and are no more. They are of left over representations that have very little identity attached to them, only impressions or indications in the cloth of someone remaining while gone. Several meanings can be applied. One is that the paintings and drawings are characterizations of the struggle to accept the departure of loved ones and the eventual nonexistence of the self. 

 

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