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​artist statement
I am a mixed media contemporary painter, fascinated by time travel and portals. For me, painting is a means to escape linear time and ponder other dimensions. As a woman, and a feminist, I sense time passing cyclically, rather than in a straight line. Most poets, musicians, and artists understand this, as well scientists like Hawking and Einstein. When I see the visual world around me, I don’t see one moment. I see millions of moments building on one another, and falling back on one another, to create a fragile, and beautiful present.
In 2016, I created a series of very small portal paintings. For these, I made condensed and ornate mixed media compositions on found wood panels. Currently, I am building a new body of work based on the passage of time over the lost lands of Indigenous tribes of Ohio. For my starting point, I take the shapes of territories of the Shawnee, the Delaware, and the Iroquois. I use these boundaries to start my creative process, and then I layer, paint, and shift the composition until these lost territories have become erased and something new comes forth. I use grids and map like elements to mimic the ways modern society has shifted these tribal lands, but I allow air, space, and a sense of connectedness to something kind, whole, and intangible that is still in the landscape. In a sense, there is a hope of renewal in my work that I believe will not be erased from the land. The land remembers. The cycle will eventually come back around to wholeness. The forgotten people who were brutally removed from their land will somehow find their way back. Is this notion naive? Perhaps. Is it my way of coping with the horrors of ethnic cleansing of which my family of German farmers is a part of? Probably. However, I do believe that if our culture viewed time as a cycle, we may develop more connections to our past, to our land, and a hope for our future. All is not lost.
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“Next time what I’d do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I’d stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
-Mary Oliver
(section of “Next Time”)