artist statement
Artist Statement
I create visual ecosystems where the microscopic becomes cosmic, where a single gesture can map both a cell and a constellation. Through delicate networks of line, texture, and thread, the female form dissolves and reconstitutes itself, hovering in that charged space between drawing and sculpture, presence and erasure.
My process is driven by the behavior of materials. While I calculate color schemes and compositional structures, it is ultimately acrylic, graphite, and ink that determine outcomes, taking me to unexpected places. I build layers of transparent paint to create depth, as far as an ocean, I imagine. My palette pulses with the vivid memories of my Caribbean upbringing: striking purples, cyan hues, bright yellow-greens, and deep blues that echo coral reefs and the ocean's changing light. These washes and fields of color are shaped by nature's bewildering, inexhaustible forms, drawing connections to topography and imagined biological structures.
Sewn copper wire traces paths across the canvas, often mistaken for shadow or a delicately drawn line. This wire holds particular significance: it embodies the quiet, persistent labor of sewing, a gesture intimately bound to female bodies and their histories. When I draw figures in continuous line, the copper thread weaves through and around them, creating a choreography where body and material become inseparable. The thread casts its own shadow, infusing the two-dimensional canvas with an illusion of movement and depth.
At the heart of my practice lies a reclamation: the recognition that aesthetic beauty holds its own form of power.
In the 1970s, beauty was rejected by the art world because it was associated with the decorative, the domestic, the realm of craft and feminine labor, and therefore deemed unserious. I challenge this dismissal. My work embraces visual pleasure: translucency that breathes, surfaces that shimmer, patterns that pulse with life. These are not escapes from meaning but assertions of it. In these luminous spaces, I reclaim what has been trivialized, insisting that what gives pleasure can also carry profound meaning, that the sensual and the intellectual need not be severed. When beauty has been coded as feminine and therefore dismissed, to insist on its value becomes its own quiet revolution.
These universes emerge from the unseen: cellular structures multiplying in darkness, ovulation cycles marking time, the permeable boundary where consciousness meets flesh. Each canvas becomes a living membrane that responds to the gentlest waft of air, influenced by the viewer's own movement.
I work for that moment of recognition when viewers lean in and suddenly see it: a smile emerging from abstract marks, eyes meeting theirs, a figure reaching through layers of material. Sometimes meticulously rendered eyes connect through a single line to minimalist representations of the female form. In these delicate lines, one can discern the curvature of a hip, the graceful roundness of cells, and at times, a subtle allusion to ovaries and pubic hair, elements that often converge into playful smiley faces looking back, happy to see them. These pieces demand proximity. They withhold their secrets from the casual glance, revealing themselves only to those who come close, who allow their eyes to adjust to subtleties of depth where realism and abstraction intersect.
My vocabulary has been shaped by Eva Hesse's vulnerable repetitions, Robert Gober's uncanny domesticity, and the humor of Claes Oldenburg. Joan Miró, James Rosenquist, and recently, Jennifer Packer have influenced my approach to color, composition, and brushwork. Like these artists, I understand that profound work can also carry lightness, that joy and criticality can coexist in the same gesture.
This is where I invite you: into spaces where beauty carries its own intelligence, where the smallest mark can hold an entire world, and where surprise unfolds in unexpected motion, in the discovery of a universe that seems, impossibly, to be looking back.
WHAT IS CONSTANT
In the creative process, my objective is to create a situation that forces my [physical] self and intuition to be completely “in the moment”.
Most of the time I hope my intuition takes over and then I find what I’m looking for:
an aesthetic solution to restlessness.
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