Artist Statement

Artist Statement: "Consumed"
Solo Exhibition, Bear Gallery, Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts, 2024

“...the force that through the green fuse drives the flower…” - Dylan Thomas

Sharing joy with your community is an essential part of the gardening experience. In this body of work, I hope to share my deep enthusiasm and love for growing things by capturing the fleeting and ephemeral moments the way that I see and remember them; through color, light, and texture. What began as a simple pandemic houseplant hobby has thoroughly rooted itself into my artistic practice over the past several years. I have always been most artistically motivated by the simple joys, the almost-mundane and the close-to-home images in my work. Maintaining a robust plant collection in my modest cabin during a cold snap is not a simple task, but the much loved indoor garden has provided me endless artistic inspiration and comfort in uncertain times.

In 2020, so many lives were upended. In my own little corner of the world, that same social turbulence shook me like a snowglobe and landed me in an unfinished home with no plumbing, little furniture and a hole in my ceiling - with winter looming large just a few months away. Compared to what so many experienced during those years, I still feel very lucky in many, many ways. Coinciding with these personal upheavals, my friend’s lovely mother moved to the Lower 48 and needed someone to take a lifetime’s worth of houseplants. All of them.

This memory remains as one of those truly poignant moments in life when the timing could not be better. Thanks to a core group of wonderful friends, my empty house, home, and heart was suddenly a chaotically beautiful indoor jungle. The simple act of caretaking these lovely living things from day to day transformed me in so many wonderful ways. The simple work allowed me to exert creative control over my immediate surroundings, in a very self-actualizing and restorative way.

These humble experiences have sparked a passion in me to not just observe nature, but to also be an active participant in learning how to care for them. I feel driven to document and share my joy of their simple, sublime moments. I truly believe plant collectors and gardening hobbyists alike will recognize and share in this unquenchable spark of energy that so enriches my life. I am consumed!

Artist Statement: "Legacy Junk"
MFA Thesis Exhibition, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2020

I recently purchased a tract of raw land with the intention of building a cabin, and wasn't terribly surprised to find the land came with some impressive piles of junk. I was frankly enamored of these objects, abandoned but not destroyed by the previous owner. They had a potentially useful quality that resonated with other aspects of the Fairbanks community; transfer sites, the airplane graveyard behind the airport, old couches and tables and wooden spools that littered the yards of countless homes. This rural detritus represents a confluence of natural and cultural forces that Alaskans experience every day. I wish to investigate this transitional territory by abstracting and amplifying the fine line between usefulness and decay.

I believe that in this modern life, it is all too easy to assume that the world of nature and the world of human culture are totally separate. For me, this assumption was repeatedly challenged after experiencing the destructive power of nature during my childhood in Tornado Alley, and more recently, the subzero temperatures of Interior Alaska. I typically draw inspiration from daily observations of my environment, and as a result my imagery changed dramatically after I moved to the far North.

Despite the change of landscape, my core concept of investigating intersections of nature and culture remains the same. This is a fascinating task in the Alaskan Interior, as these intersections are clearly exposed. This community has a unique relationship to nature, as modern homes and businesses coexist with virtually untouched wilderness. These experiences have instilled in me a deep respect for the vast web of life that both supports and threatens my community, and motivates me to seek out and emphasize places where natural and artificial worlds collide using the malleable language of art and oil painting.