Archive

This collection of paintings resulted from two family artist residencies in the last six months and reflects a new way of working with my children: We activated the paintings together using casein paint. Then, I worked by myself using oil paint to reveal the movements and marks that stood out to me.

These paintings brings out the energies and connections experienced with flowers, the unspeakable and preverbal that we share when we are in contact with nature's unruly beauty.

My flowers are not the result of observational drawing or traditional nature paintings; they are visual expressions of the experiential movement and vitality that flowers give us. Ultimately, these paintings respond to my trust in the human capacity to be impacted by subtlety and notice beyond what we can see.

I exhibited these paintings at the Soil Factory in February 2024. You can read the text that accompanied the  exhibition here. 

 

The collection Within Darkness proposes the welcoming of creative stages that are in darkness, the often difficult and initial tasks that we must undertake when we are learning something new, experimenting, desiring change, or looking for solutions. These works are also a homage to Audre Lorde’ by referencing her poems “Now that I am forever with child,” “A Litany for Survival,” and “A Woman Speaks” in each artwork’s title. 

These paintings were done by Helena when she was three years old. She used edible, non-toxic paint on paper with brushes and her hands. I added white and black lines using acrylic pen on the paintings, then digitized them into a black background.

To paint with a young child is to accept the messiness and the whole-body exploration of materials. Through this making process, I found resonance with Lorde’s call for creativity: “...we must never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is… Sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting…” 

 

The Power of Creation is a collection of paintings done together with my daughter Helena when she was two years old. While doing this work, I prioritized Helena’s creative impulse and individual capacity as a very young human being. So I sat back and waited until she was done painting on one paper and proceeded to another. My contribution to each work was to merely finish adding color to the background or any space left in white that I thought should be colored, which means that all the shapes and movements in these works come from the creative power of a child. When selecting these paintings to become a collection, I intended to offer proof of our innate creative ability.