The Places I Become

Artist Statement

My creative nature is like a room full of mirrors, reflecting as an artist, teacher, mother, explorer, and visual storyteller. I am a mixed media artist, focusing on my photography as a reference library. I use this library to combine painting, drawing, encaustic, collage, and printmaking techniques, accentuating the media through expiration. My visual stories subtly reveal both personal and borrowed memories. My personal memories capture a historical perspective of growing up in New England. I combine unsettling interiors, unsteady landscapes, and ghost-like figures that reflect a unique sense of place through my work. My borrowed memories derive from authors like Sarah Orn Jewett, Emily Bronte, or Mary Shelly, who inspire the essence of what I am trying to capture in my work: emotions of romance and isolation existing at the same time. My whole life, I have felt that I was meant to live in a different time and place, and my happiest days were living in a partially renovated old farmhouse in Otisfield, Maine, that lacked many of today’s amenities, like the internet, electricity, and decent plumbing. I wrote and sketched my memoirs to the dim glow of antique oil lamps, candles, and a wood-burning stove. I basked in my existence as a single mother, alone and struggling to exist.