​Artist Statement 

     Working with oil painting, printmaking, and digital mediums, my practice examines the themes of human connection­­­ and anxiety. My work delves into the confining and claustrophobic qualities of being trapped in one's mind when dealing with anxiety, as well as the feeling of unreality and separation between the person and their environment. Having lived with anxiety for much of my life, my practice revolves around a personal evaluation of my relationship with my anxious thoughts.  

     For those living with anxiety, home is most often the place we retreat to when feeling overwhelmed, anxious or defeated. These domestic spaces offer us a sense of comfort, and while “home” can look different for everyone, the general markers—the kitchen, the bedroom, the dinner table—are fairly universal.  For many people, however, home can also be a source of anxiety due to the relationships tied to it or other events we connect with it.  This can leave them with a conflicting association to the word “home,” as both an escape and as a place of instability and a cause of anxiety.  These instances of uncertainty and conflicting attitudes are particularly interesting to me and are a recurring theme I explore in my paintings.   

     My work is informed by classic 2D animation and the women who created this distinct, narrative style like Mary Blair. An interest high realism and the technical intensity of historical portraiture creates a diverse foundation for my practice.  Although existing in different time periods and with vastly different aesthetic qualities, I use these two styles in my paintings, creating works where one aspect is represented in an illustrative style while the other is painted in high realism, adding to the conceptual idea of isolation and of feeling out of place in your own home.  In my current series Anxious in Familiar Places, the four paintings juxtapose self-portrait figures with backgrounds from my childhood home and are executed with the figure and the background painted in opposing styles of high realism and 2D animation.  This dichotomous series generates a tour of my house, placing me within these spaces that are both refuges and sources of anxiety.  The figures remain isolated within their environment until the very last piece, which has a realistic self-portrait confronting an illustrative self-portrait in the bathroom mirror, indicating that these two sides, these two interpretations of myself and my environment coexist simultaneously.