Statement (Main)
My art begins with the question "What is a drawing?" I take an interdisciplinary approach to expand the concept of drawing that includes installation, works on paper, photography, and video. To further this investigation, I explore the relationship between drawing, time, and thinking to see how they can affect and redevelop each other. Works are composed of marks that are signs of time and, referencing artist Avis Newman, thought. Light and shadow, daily life, temporality, and Eastern philosophy are influences. I aim to work responsively in the space between all these entities. That is where experimentation happens and the medium opens to what it can be.
I am interested in an organic approach to drawing that moves fluidly between mediums and dimensions. This exchange creates a banter between the 2D, 3D, and disparate materials; all interacting to expand the medium and blur its formal parameters.
Newman's statement, “A mark is a sign of
thought.”, informs my Art on many levels. As the hand or body makes a line
across paper or space, what happens inside the mind? This has led to an
interest in the relationship between drawing and time. How is time experienced
when mark making? How can it be perceived
when working between dimensions? Concurrently, I am interested in how a site and daily activities, like walking or gardening, can influence how drawings form. Various philosophies, particularly Taoism,
inform and guide my practice. It encourages forming perspectives from an even
place.
In my work, marks are generic and nondescript. These qualities leave them open for interpretation, as they suggest rather than show. Mark making allows one to explore a state of "being" when working, rather than “doing”. Works grow out of light and shadow and in response to their surroundings. In Time Lines, Walking Drawings, and In the Garden series, I mark or record shadows cast by the sun in relation to architecture, geometric forms, and nature. Light, when interacting with a building or 3D structure, turns into shapes that shift in form as it moves. This action or happening becomes an entry point into a drawing.
Tracing and recording shadow lines (either while working in the studio or when performing a walking drawing) bridges the internal world of thought with the external happenings of my surroundings. Marking their movement leads me to experience the ephemeral and encourages keen observation and reflection. The static mark and image produced as a result contrasts and endures the temporal. Engagement in this practice over time leads to surprising microscopic and macrocosmic interconnections and alignments. Unexpected formal dialogues emerge from the process that piques curiosity to see what happens next.
Resulting works are frameworks of consideration.
Current Series:
Time Lines:
In Time Lines (2015-current), shadows lines cast by the sun are traced in relation to architecture. Surprising harmonies and alignments emerge during the mark making process,
Drawing and Daily Life:
How can drawing merge with the everyday to see and experience both in unusual and surprising ways?
Happenings (In the Garden). This series grew out of time spent in my garden on sunny days. Shadow activities cast by the shifts in sunlight were traced onto paper.
Walking Drawings
In Walking Drawings, I engage in a responsive mark making process to surrounding phenomena. The activity encourages being fully present to one’s surroundings and as one moves through it. I walk and draw during the in-between moments of a day. These include when running errands and taking nature walks after work or weekend.
I am also interested in how this kind of drawing is site responsive and site specific and how that can offer unusual ways of creating installations.
Sight Drawings
Sight Drawings are drawings seen in passing. They may share formal qualities, like line, and tone, with traditional works, or stir the imagination for new ones to come. No interventions are made. They are images of what could be.
The Shadows and Shimmer in the City series focuses on the interplay of light and shadow, seen as marks, upon urban architecture and how drawings can develop out of this often overlooked, everyday occurrence. Photos are taken when driving or walking around the city. Sometimes I seek them out while other times they find me.
Installations
Much like Sight Drawings, current installations focus on temporality and the interplay of light and shadow upon architecture or geometric structures. They grow out of moments in time; when light enters a window or peeps through the slits in a wooden deck. Interventions are made with small scale geometric materials like cinderblocks to stir a drawing into being. Shifts in lighting and shadow are documented. The resulting static. digital images contrast the movement of light.
Past Series:
Between 0 and 1:
“All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted:...”
― Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
The works on paper, Between 0 and 1, explore the link between drawing, time, and thinking at the quantum level. In that micro-world, myriad interactions occur in matter between these small numeric values. Works are made by tracing sunlight as it shifts in relation to architecture over several weeks. The accumulation of lines become a record of the sun’s tracks; metaphors for the ephemeral nature thought. Their interweaving calls for further responsive mark making. Epiphanic moments of clarity emerge when seemingly random lines align and harmonize.
Progressions
How can dimensions and diverse media affect how a drawing develops?
Progressions, Shuffling(s), and Reshufflings: Dialogue Between Dimensions:
The Progression(s) and Shuffling(s) series explore a dialogue between dimensions, media, and time to expand how to see and experience drawing.
Conglomerate (Progressions) are photographs of geometric constructions built in relation to light and shadow. The term progressions alludes to successions of musical chords produced over time to stir harmonies. These constructions changed in form as sunlight shifted over the course of several hours on cement. Different stages of the activity were photographed and times are noted in the titles.
Installations/Conglomerates
Using ordinary construction materials such as tiles, shelves, and molding...works from the Conglomerate series (2007-ongoing) occupy a space between drawing, sculpture, and architecture... the elements 'interact in "states of tension and flow'." (Margaret Winslow).