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Mentorship is important in all lines of work, especially the arts. Who would you consider to be a mentor?
My mentors have always been in my head. I try to listen to the voices of other artists whose work I admire and moves me. More times than not, I’m trying to have a dialog with a musician, novelist, or poet.
Artists often cite inspirations and influences. What other artists inspire you? Is your work influenced by any specific movement or theory?
I ask myself, when does a painting end and a textile begin? I understand my work to be queer paintings made by a cis-gendered woman, so I look at artists like Mike Kelley, Cosima Von Bonin, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Bontecou and Robert Rauschenberg, to name a few.
Art usually addresses something conceptual…whether it’s political, personal, emotional. What does your work address in concept?
My work converses with histories of medieval and modernist art. I am interesting in reframing the gendered and material assumptions of painting through slow craft processes while practicing a quiet form of refusal. I have always refused the either-or binaries about art and craft and the gendering of making. What I’m interested in is mediating narratives and claiming space, be it through color, form, symbolic language, written language, or graphic signs. I reference medieval art – mostly narratives found in Mille-Fleur tapestries as well as modernist forms found in painting, sculpture, and textiles.
Can you explain your work? Medium? Technique?
I am a multi-disciplinary painter who thinks through craft. My work is about challenging the material parameters of painting by utilizing slow craft practices to develop hybrid paintings. My questions are, “Where does a painting end and a textile begin? Is painting a verb? What refusal does handwork signal?" If you look at the compositions embedded in my canvases, it's clear my work is driven by form and materials, aligning them with paintings, tapestries, and quilts, equally.
Where can someone see your work?
At Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, CA and at Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago.
What is the best advice you’ve received?
In a social justice course in undergrad, I learned that although oppressive leaders can have dominion over an oppressed peoples’ property, goods and bodies, they could never subjugate their minds. The mind is your most powerful tool. That has stuck with me.